Have we been looking at different data? I don't see how any mRNA product has performed significantly better.
Sinovac wasn't great against the original strain, but against Omicron, Sinovac is basically worthless. A two-dose regimen provides literally no benefit, and three doses is only equivalent to unboosted, two-dose mRNA (aka, not really effective): https://news.yale.edu/2022/01/20/vaccine-used-much-world-no-...
Sinovac is trash, but politically China can't admit failure and buy the Western vaccines, and hence it's stuck with lockdowns.
Note that Hong Kong's Center for Health Protection (CHP) has consistently been way ahead of any other public health establishment in tracking and responding to COVID; they launched on-arrival rapid testing in March 2020 (!) and realized COVID was airborne, not fomite-transmitted, months before the CDC did. They've also consistently released provably accurate numbers. Hong Kong has had a bad response to COVID recently, but all of it is due to the bureaucrats in charge ignoring the CHP's scientifically-based health advice in favour of mandates handed down from the mainland government.
In any case, the numbers show that while Sinovac isn't as great as Pfizer, it's much better than being unvaccinated. The case fatality rate among 80+ year olds who got covid is 15.68% for unvaccinated people, 3.98% for those with 2 doses of Sinovac and 1.73% for those with 2 doses of Pfizer. For 70-79 year olds it's 5.28%, 0.6% and 0.33% respectively. Note that all of Hong Kong's recent wave was from Omicron.
We forget how lucky as a civilization we were to develop mRNA vaccines in response to COVID, and how much better than expectations they were. We would have been thrilled with the efficacy of Sinovac. So while Sinovac is definitely worse than Pfizer, it's misleading and alarmist to say that it's 'basically worthless.'
If you think I'm being "misleading," here's a direct quote from Yale statement: "However, those [Sinovac] vaccinations alone are of no help against the widely circulating omicron variant, shows a new study by researchers at Yale and the Dominican Republic. The results are published in the journal Nature Medicine.
An analysis of blood serum from 101 individuals from the Dominican Republic showed that omicron infection produced no neutralizing antibodies among those who received the standard two-shot regimen of the Sinovac vaccine.
...
But when researchers compared these samples with blood serum samples stored at Yale, they found that even those who had received two Sinovac shots and a booster had antibody levels that were only about the same as those who’d received two shots of the mRNA vaccines but no booster shot."
That's pretty much exactly what I posted! So no, I don't think I'm being misleading.
Regardless, even if you suppose the entire HK dataset is 100% Omicron cases, and ignore the sample biases, it's still pretty poor compared to Pfizer; the OP claimed they were roughly the same, which I was refuting.
The most recent datapoints (7 day average):
- Not fully vaccinated: 14.86 cases per 100,000 people
- Fully vaccinated: 17.39 cases per 100,000 people
- Vaccinated with booster: 26.89 cases per 100,000 people
https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data/case-numbers-and-spread#cas...
The deaths by vaccination status stats on that same page are pretty interesting.
Agreed, the deaths by vaccination status shows a stronger benefit, particularly with age.
This leads to very confusing debates, the "headline" stats used to sell the vaccine demonstrate high effectiveness (they tend to use data from the 4-6 month window where they know it will look good).
The metastudies / long-term studies tell a more nuanced story.
Ontario changed the way it reports COVID data in March, and thus finding prior data is annoying on my phone for Ontario specifically. But pretty much every other data source I've looked at agrees: during the Omicron peak, the vast, vast majority of cases per 100k were in the unvaccinated.