Covid-19 vaccine candidate is 90% effective, says manufacturer | Hacker News Reader

Covid-19 vaccine candidate is 90% effective, says manufacturer

theguardian.com

12 pointsj4mie6 comments

I'm not sure to understand what 90% means in this context.

We know that more than 80% of the infected people do not show any symptoms, and that around 0.5% (mostly elders) die from COVID.

Do the 90% addresses the death rate of those 0.5% ?

I would understand it to mean that for every 100 people in the placebo arm who were diagnosed with COVID, only 10 people in the treatment arm were diagnosed with COVID.

Also note that being "diagnosed with COVID" (and COVID was explicitly used in the press release: "more than 90% effective in preventing COVID-19 in participant") is not the same as "not catching the virus at all (and being unable to transmit it to the more vulnerable -- note: at least 25% of people in the most developed countries, and even more in the U.S, can be considered "vulnerable" -- it's not "just the very old.").

So as it is written, it merely means that the from the vaccinated persons ("study enrolled 43,538 participant") in the distribution of the observed 94 "cases" diagnosed with COVID-19 it is seen that 90% of them are among the control group (among those who received placebo).

Note that the illness (as in "having symptoms") is called "COVID-19" and the test to the mere presence of the virus would have been formulated like "SARS-CoV-2 was not detected" and that's not what is written in the press release.

https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-deta...

Let's hope that the later information includes the tests to the presence of the virus, if it is at all regularly performed on the test subjects.

But also:

https://www.fiercepharma.com/manufacturing/pfizer-biontech-n...

"Analysts specifically cast doubt on Pfizer and BioNTech's rollout plans given the stringent cold-storage needs for their candidate, which must be kept at a frigid -94° Fahrenheit (-70° Celsius), and will last for only 24 hours at refrigerated temps between 35.6°F and 46.4°F (2°-8°C).

By contrast, most protein subunit vaccines—the type being developed for COVID-19 by Sanofi and Novavax, among others—can be held at refrigerated temps for months, analysts said."

It's not your run-of-the-mill freezer but hardly an unsolved problem.

Just after election result!

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