Acknowledgements: This study was supported by the COVID-19 Longitudinal Health and Wellbeing National Core Study, funded by the UKRI Medical Research Council (MC_PC_20059); the COVID-19 Data and Connectivity National Core Study, funded by the UKRI Medical Research Council; and by the CONVALESCENCE long COVID study, funded by the UK National Institute for Health and Care Research (COVID-LT-009). This work was also supported by Health Data Research UK, which is funded by the UK Medical Research Council, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Economic and Social Research Council, Department of Health and Social Care (England), Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health and Social Care Directorates, Health and Social Care Research and Development Division (Welsh Government), Public Health Agency (Northern Ireland), British Heart Foundation and Wellcome. GC, SI and AWo are supported by the British Heart Foundation (RG/13/13/30194; RG/18/13/33946), BHF Cambridge Centre of Research Excellence (RE/18/1/34212) and NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre (BRC-1215-20014; NIHR203312). RK, GDS, and VW are supported by the Medical Research Council Integrative Epidemiology Unit at the University of Bristol [MC_UU_00011/1; MC_UU_00011/4]. RK and JACS are supported by the NIHR Bristol Biomedical Research Centre and by Health Data Research UK South-West. YW was supported by a UKRI MRC Fellowship (MC/W021358/1) and received funding from the UKRI EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account (EP/X525789/1). SI and AWo were funded by a British Heart Foundation–Turing Cardiovascular Data Science Award (BCDSA/100005). SI is funded by the International Alliance for Cancer Early Detection, a partnership among Cancer Research UK C18081/A31373, Canary Center at Stanford University, the University of Cambridge, OHSU Knight Cancer Institute, University College London, and the University of Manchester. RK and JM were supported by NIHR ARC West. RD and JACS were supported by Health Data Research UK. WW is supported by the Chief Scientist’s Office (CAF/01/17). AWo and WW are supported by the Stroke Association (SA CV 20/100018). AWo is part of the BigData@Heart Consortium, funded by the Innovative Medicines Initiative-2 Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No 116074. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care. We are very grateful for all the support received from the OpenSAFELY team and the TPP Technical Operations team throughout this work, and for generous assistance from the information governance and database teams at NHS England and the NHS England Transformation Directorate. We thank the CONVALESCENCE Study Long Covid PPIE group for their input and for sharing their experiences and expertise throughout the duration of the project.Funder: UKRI Medical Research Council (MC_PC_20059) UK National Institute for Health and Care Research (COVID-LT-009)AbstractInfection with SARS-CoV-2 is associated with an increased risk of arterial and venous thrombotic events, but the implications of vaccination for this increased risk are uncertain. With the approval of NHS England, we quantified associations between COVID-19 diagnosis and cardiovascular diseases in different vaccination and variant eras using linked electronic health records for ~40% of the English population. We defined a ‘pre-vaccination’ cohort (18,210,937 people) in the wild-type/Alpha variant eras (January 2020-June 2021), and ‘vaccinated’ and ‘unvaccinated’ cohorts (13,572,399 and 3,161,485 people respectively) in the Delta variant era (June-December 2021). We showed that the incidence of each arterial thrombotic, venous thrombotic and other cardiovascular outcomes was substantially elevated during weeks 1-4 after COVID-19, compared with before or without COVID-19, but less markedly elevated in time periods beyond week 4. Hazard ratios were higher after hospitalised than non-hospitalised COVID-19 and higher in the pre-vaccination and unvaccinated cohorts than the vaccinated cohort. COVID-19 vaccination reduces the risk of cardiovascular events after COVID-19 infection. People who had COVID-19 before or without being vaccinated are at higher risk of cardiovascular events for at least two years.</jats:p
