Officials, Pfizer, and Moderna were loudly celebrating the "94%" or "95%" effectiveness, which was measured in symptomatic cases. Now its 0-20% w/o a booster. The vaccine is clearly less effective than before, which is understandable given the new variant. But it's definitely disappointing--a lot more people will die because the herd immunity clock got reset.
So it seems like other, more effective measures to reduce infections are more likely to keep people healthy rather than trying to reduce the severity of symptoms (which is what vaccines do atm)
The vaccine was never touted as being 100% effective.
For Pfizer the (Lancet study) efficacy numbers ranged from 88-93%, the first month after full vaccination.
After 4 months the effectiveness waned to 47-67% (depending on the variant). So now the focus on boosters.
My point is that 100% vaccination should never have led to the expectation of 0 cases of covid. But the main thing was reducing ICU numbers/severe infections.
Experts and health officials were already expecting vaccines to be only 50-75% effective, so this isn't new information.
That's what's so frustrating to me about the "herd immunity" discourse. Health officials have consistently said there's no way the disease is going to be eradicated, but because of the way it gets discussed, a lot of smart people have become convinced that the goal of a vaccine is to make sure nobody catches it.
I think someone needs to point out that 20% is a very different number than many people were sold a vaccine under.
How did we drop so far from the 90+% “effectiveness” claims at the beginning? Feels like there needs to be a massive postmortem on the approval process here.
The actual study results show the vaccine is highly effective within 10 days of the first dose.
Honestly a bit shocked based on the results and the number of lives that could be saved by effectively doubling the number of available doses that they didn’t try to get it modified to a single dose regimen.
Seems to me like just another way the FDA has screwed up this whole rollout.
In the FDA's press release approving Pfizer yesterday [1], they justified it saying the vaccine had a 91% effectiveness. But everyone knows that number is no longer true - it was from March, before Delta.
Why is the "VE-D" number nowhere near the original 95% efficacy number widely reported for the Pfizer/Moderna vaccines when they were originally approved?
Is it different methodology or is it changed nature of the pandemic?
Note that only n=2,741 people received the 90% efficient dosing. That's 10+ times less than the mRNA vaccines so the confidence intervals on that number will be a lot wider
The Pfizer press release reported a week (or so) ago said the vaccine was "over 90% effective" in the preliminary data. They did not explicitly say the vaccine was 90.000% effective.
Presumably that has not been a primary concern, since other vaccines also have historically had regular boosters and haven’t seen that happen (referring to Tdap, rabies, or flu shots)
Flu vaccine has historically also been around 25-50% effective, and is still recommended and paid for by insurance, since the benefit is measured positively to you. So there is some precedent for disappointing numbers still being promoted for their small estimated benefits in net.
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