Certainly traditional vaccines are understood as being something that reduces risk of infection. Dramatically so, in fact. Is that the case with these COVID-19 vaccines? It seems very unclear, but we have a lot of examples of highly vaccinated areas seeing surges in recent weeks, so it seems unlikely they are highly effective to say the least.
And I did look into the clinical trials. I posted this in the main COVID thread recently, but didn't get any responses. If you have further insights, I would love to read them, because if the below is really how those figures were reached and sold to us, then we are being taken for a fucking ride.
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In regards to the 95% efficacy against infection figure initially thrown out for the Pfizer vaccine, is this really the source?
Frequently asked questions on the emergency use authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine
www.fda.gov
So basically they took the number of people who "had evidence of infection through 7 days after the second dose" in each group and divided it by their respective total group sizes to get a percentage, then took the vaccine group's percentage and divided it by their placebo group's percentage to get 5%, or 95% efficacy?
Or basically this? Please correct me if I'm getting something (everything?) wrong about how they landed on this figure.
| Total | Trial | Placebo | Trial vs. Placebo |
Participants | 36523 | 18198 | 18325 | 99.31% |
Got Covid | 170 | 8 | 162 | 4.94% |
Got Severe Covid | 4 | 1 | 3 | 33.33% |
% of Total that got COVID | 0.4655% | 0.0440% | 0.8840% | 4.97% |
% of Total that got Severe COVID | 0.0110% | 0.0055% | | 33.57% |