I'd take any approved vaccine without hesitation if it'd be offered to me right now. But if I am free to choose: It'd be Biontech or Moderna.
But I wasn't given a choice, and I'd happily get J&J if it was "this or nothin." So I ended up with Pfizer anyway.
There are error bars on those point estimates, and they're wide, because the trials didn't have a huge number of hospitalizations or deaths. You also can't compare them across trials, because they were tested on different populations, at different times, under different conditions (i.e. dominant variants, but also temperature, disease prevlance, etc.)
Based on everything I've seen so far, the approved vaccines are all essentially statistically indistinguishable, with the caveat that the J&J vaccine is one dose, the mRNA vaccines are two, and the AZ trial was kind of a mess. But the choice of dosing strategy was always somewhat arbitrary, based on the inherent sloppiness of a combined phase 1/2 trial. Had Pfizer and Moderna decided to go with a one-shot regimen, the trial would have reported a very similar effectiveness profile to J&J.
I strongly suspect we'll see better data on all three that will put them within a margin of error of each other, and suggest better dosing strategies.
Also AstraZeneca keeps getting suspended due to blood clots. I think we're up to 7 or 8 countries now? Canada was the most recent I remember, but I think most have resumed now.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/rare-clotting-disord...
The running theory appears to be that in rare cases, that vaccine results in antibodies that attack platelets, causing a weird reaction that results in clotting.
I'm definitely not an expert in this area, but people who are tell me that the rate of this (very rare) clotting abnormality is higher in the general public than it is amongst the vaccinated. At least so far.
Certainly, the fact that governments choose to do something is not scientific evidence of much of anything. Governments have chosen to do a lot of objectively silly things during this pandemic.
From what we know so far, any of the approved vaccines are excellent and no one knows for sure if one is better than the other. The only logical thing to do is get what is offered to you as soon as possible.
The effectiveness is measured as 1-(Nnotinfected / (Ninfected + Nnotinfected)).
The video claims that when the study was done during the surge or in "other countries", the effectiveness might be different because Ninfected is higher, which makes no sense at all, since the probability of the vaccine protecting you shouldn't change based on how the virus is spreading in the general population. For a set of 100 placebo and 100 vaccinated, even if all 100 are infected, the vaccinated segment should be as protected as possible. 95% efficacy means only 5 in the vaccinated are infected. 66% efficacy means 50 in the vaccinated are infected.
For the part about other countries, what they are saying is that there were more infectious strains circulating in those countries during the trial, so you can't compare to trials done before those strains were circulating.
Unless you are claiming that right now there are less strains around, compared to october-novemeber (when the J&J data was compiled)
This news just solidifies the argument that the mRna vaccines are much better. Suggesting otherwise is just either ignorance, or willful lie (let other take it, so i have more for me)