EDIT: See child comment re: Pfizer press release.
EDIT 2: See [1] for said press release, which has more detailed information than the BBC article.
[1] https://investors.pfizer.com/investor-news/press-release-det...
"One dose of MMR vaccine is 93% effective against measles, 78% effective against mumps, and 97% effective against rubella.
Two doses of MMR vaccine are 97% effective against measles and 88% effective against mumps."
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/mmr/public/index.html#:~:te....
The FDA is not known for its improvisational disposition :)
Looking at the phase 1/2 results, the booster shot seems to help a lot in getting the antibody levels up. See Figure 4 of their paper, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2027906
I didn't see the case numbers but I've inferred to arrive at 90% that there were 9 cases in vaccinated group vs 85 in controls. (95% C.I. 80-99%)
Very interested to see forthcoming results from competitors that don't face the -80 degrees issue.
Those are the numbers that matter, statistically. If the total number of people in the study were 2 thousand or 2 billion doesn't enter into the math.
It affects confidence, and potentially the result of the test entirely. I won't be more specific because stats was never a strong suit and my memory's hazy, but I remember enough to know it matters!
It does seem low for the US where you have 3% of the population had disease already in 2020. Perhaps more data came from Germany? Or it could be they measure not just PCR +ve results, but antibody levels and/or severe symptoms?
It's the same as 'herd immunity', where each member is '90% immune' and as a result the herd is 'more immune' than if only 10% of its members were 100% immune.
Hasn't this virus already mutated to a bunch of different strands? Could it mean you're immune to 90% of the known variations of the virus?
Because the reports from Denmarks Mink fiasco indicated that antibodies were not as effective on the mutation that appeared there short time ago. This would contradict the one-fits-all immunity argument.
For the "danish mink mutation" - even if the exception to the rule - some of the above statements might not be true.
I don't think that argument is being made at all.
In fact, you only need to consider that the max efficiency that's advertised is 90% to acknowledge that this vaccine is not a silver bullet.
What are you basing that on, when there are known cases of people getting coronavirus and then still contracting the other strain of it?
A patient must present a infection and the particular virus must be sequenced, and then present with an infection later on where the virus is again sequenced and identified as sufficiently different from the first sample. Otherwise it cannot be deemed a re-infection.
If these small differences in the genomic sequence are already a different strand, I don't know, not an expert. But all 5 (?) cases known so far had a different sequence identified the second time.
> The genomes of the patient’s virus samples from April and June displayed significant genetic differences between them, suggesting that the patient was infected twice by 2 distinct COVID-19 infections.
I’d read of known second infections that are from different strains, but scientists also question lasting immunity from COVID-19 infection because other coronaviruses are seasonal.
It was possible to positively identify a reinfection because the two infections were due to different strains. That was just the means of positively and objectively identify a reinfection. However, nothing was asserted regarding if the patient was immune to the first strain the first time around. In fact, it seems that the hallmark of reinfections is that they are far more critical than first infections. This also means that the first infections is far milder than the second one. Well, the thing about the immune system is that it is able to fight mild infections without developing immunity if they are too mild to trigger a full response from the immune system.
OK. The longevity of the immunity is also an issue perhaps; at least they have written articles about people becoming re-infected; so even the people who do become immune may not stay that way forever...
In my country there have been hundreds of thousands of confirmed Covid infections. There have been <100 confirmed re-infections.
It's very early to draw the conclusion that people in general don't build up lasting immunity, and there is more than enough data to support that most people do build up immunity of several months at least. If the latter wasn't true you'd see much more re-infections.
OK, some (needed) good news..
I admit I know very little on how immunity to diseases work, but I imagine that with viruses there is a chance it'll progress to a full blown infection even if you are vaccinated in some cases.
I'm just saying how you can have a single person that's 90% immune to something vs. Having 90% of people immune against one strain of a virus.
"Vaccine efficacy is the percentage reduction of disease in a vaccinated group of people compared to an unvaccinated group"
So basically a 90% reduction in Covid infection.
https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dsepd/ss1978/lesson3/section6.html
So "disease" is probably an infection there, not relatively milder infection.
90% still crushes the transmission rate.
Unfortunately, there's yet another property of vaccine performance: some prevent the virus from reaching any level of footing in the host, others only make the body's eventual response stronger, preventing initial footing to cause heavy illness. SARS2-COV is rather peculiar in how its transmission performance is particularly strong in early, mostly presymptomatic stages, so it's perfectly possible to end up with a vaccine that reliably protects carriers from disease, but does not remove them from the spread equations at all, or only very little.
Pfizer is saying that their vaccine is effective at protecting against CoVID-19 disease. They haven't said anything about preventing SARS-CoV-2 infection yet, as far as I can see. The difference is important, because there are vaccines (such as the Salk polio vaccine) that only protect against disease, but not against infection. People get infected and pass on the virus without ever getting sick, so there's no herd immunity.
The challenge will be reconciling this with the antivax crowd given that as the vaccine rolls out the rate of infection will come down correspondingly among the whole population (including the unvaccinated). They'll immediately claim that the virus is "going away on it's own" as opposed to the truth, which is that potential spreaders are being steadily removed from the susceptible population due to the vaccine.
It's going to be a very slow roll out.
Not withstanding the rather enormous caveat of antivaxxers. They have grown significantly in number during this pandemic what with all the wild conspiracy theories. It’s worth checking that out.
There's no need to completely eliminate COVID - we don't aim for the same for regular influenza. We should aim to reopen economies as soon as possible instead.
For the most part the same answer as to why you aren't making it yourself also apply to most factories in the world. Only a few have the equipment, supplies, and experience to make it.
A vaccine that only prevents disease, but which does not prevent infection, does not necessarily create herd immunity.
Eradicating the virus is a whole different goal, and there could be lots of different impediments to that. After all, we still get vaccinated for a large numbers of illnesses that we haven't eradicated but are just very rare. That's not a terrible endgame for COVID.
Letting this thing circulate seems dangerous given it introduces the possibility of a vaccine-resistant mutation. If anything it drives the evolution of the virus towards vaccine resistance similar to what happened with MRSA bacteria and antibiotics.
as their primary outcome in their study registration