Safe and effective vaccines are essential for the prevention and control of COVID-19 pandemic. In the evaluations of COVID-19 vaccines' safety and efficiency in experimental research and the surveillance for COVID-19 vaccines' safety and population based effectiveness in observational study, epidemiology research has played a critical role. By analyzing research cases both at home and abroad, this paper systematically introduces the applications and design elements of clinical trial, cohort study and case-control study in the evaluations of COVID-19 vaccines' safety and efficiency in clinical trials and safety and population based effectiveness clinical use to enrich epidemiology teaching cases. After the marketing of COVID-19 vaccines, some foreign countries rapidly organized and carried out population based observational research for the clinical evaluation of the vaccines with sample size ranging from several hundred thousand to ten million. Benefiting from the developed public health, medical and medical insurance information systems in these countries, their data can be shared for integrated analysis, which would has important enlightenment for the development of medical big data in China.

Vaccine; Epidemiology; Effectiveness; Safety