9 ms·

At the time of writing (2020-11-09 12:04 UTC) the article uses "90% of people" and "90% protection" interchangeably. I assume it means "90% of individuals achie

• refurb 6y ago
  From Pfizer's press release, they use "vaccine efficacy" which has a very specific definition. "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.
  • 3dbrows 6y ago
    Thank you, do you happen to have a link?
    • shakna 6y ago
      https://investors.pfizer.com/investor-news/press-release-details/2020/Pfizer-and-BioNTech-Announce-Vaccine-Candidate-Against-COVID-19-Achieved-Success-in-First-Interim-Analysis-from-Phase-3-Study/default.aspx https://investors.pfizer.com/investor-news/press-release-det...
  • st1x7 6y ago
    Can't that be interpreted as either of the options in the parent comment?
    • kgwgk 6y ago
      90% of the time it works every time. :-)
  • maxerickson 6y ago
    This CDC page defines it in terms of cases: https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dsepd/ss1978/lesson3/section6.html 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.
    • usrusr 6y ago
      > 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.
  • shmel 6y ago
    So what does it mean? Less severe symptoms or sterilizing immunity?
    • hannob 6y ago
      Neither of those. It means you don't get sick if you get in contact with the virus. Whether that means you're immune (i.e. not spreading the virus to others) is a different question that apparently hasn't been answered by this preliminary data yet. (And I can see this is more difficult to study.)
      • m3kw9 6y ago
        Meaning you can get a virus, but your body will produce enough antibodies to neutralize it so it doesn’t spread to detectable levels.
  • DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
    There's no such thing as "Covid infection". There's SARS-CoV-2 infection, which often causes CoVID-19 disease. 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.
• TremendousJudge 6y ago
  First phrasing makes more sense than the second one to me -- what would it even mean for somebody to be "90% immune" to a disease?
  • permo-w 6y ago
    only your feet get ill
  • carlmr 6y ago
    I would assume something like with the influenza vaccine, where you have immunity to i think around 70% of currently available virus mutations, if the vaccine works.
    • usrusr 6y ago
      That's a percentage on a different axis. Influenza is a diverse family of related viruses and strains vary much more than those of SARS-COV-2. No surprise given the very different time since taking foot in humans, and in addition to that (I think, working on weak knowledge here) that influenza is even part of a group of viruses that is prone to create mashup versions of itself when two strains meet in the same host. Think Dangermouse, Grey Album.
      • carlmr 6y ago
        I'm explaining a concept, nothing specific to the flu or covid. 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.
  • jyoshi 6y ago
    Perhaps its something like "90% percent of the individuals' immune system are successful in quick eliminating covid without any symptoms or adverse reactions". 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.
  • 6y ago
• FirstLvR 6y ago
  thank you, this makes more sense
• Roonerelli 6y ago
  Excellent news it's so high. For comparison, MMR is 88% effective on Mumps "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#:~:text=One%20dose%20of%20MMR%20vaccine%20is%2093%25%20effective%20against%20measles,and%2088%25%20effective%20against%20mumps https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/mmr/public/index.html#:~:te....
  • innomatics 6y ago
    It is great news. 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.
    • StavrosK 6y ago
      Out of 45,000 people, only 86ish people got infected in the trial arm? Isn't that too few? Even for the control arm, that's still only 774 people infected.
      • BurningFrog 6y ago
        No, 94 people total got infected. At least 85 were in the control group. 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.
        • OJFord 6y ago
          That's not true, population size absolutely 'enters into the math'. 9 vs. 85 does not give the same result independently of whether N=94, 200, 2k, or 2B. 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!
• headmelted 6y ago
  Pretty confident it's the former, which if the case, essentially ends the pandemic in a month after it's distributed, given that the R0 would drop precipitously. 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.
  • mquirion 6y ago
    It's a 2-dose regimen, needs to be stored at -70C, and Pfizer already said they'll only have 1.5B doses over the course of the next year. It's going to be a very slow roll out.
    • selectodude 6y ago
      While true, the approach they took is extremely similar to several other vaccine candidates which is a good sign that the approach works and other vaccines will be equally effective.
    • Devils-Avocado 6y ago
      Which is completely sufficient to vaccinate the elderly, teachers, immunocompromised, and healthcare workers in the Western world, and probably anyone else who really wants it. 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.
    • dclowd9901 6y ago
      Why aren’t we using _all_ the factories to make as many doses as possible? There should not be “companies” making these to their capacity. This should be a public effort
      • bluGill 6y ago
        You first: why aren't you making this in your garage right now? 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.
• collyw 6y ago
  It's the BBC, I wouldn't expect any scientific rigour from them.
• koalala 6y ago
  The way these studies (most of the big trials finishing up soon, and this one too) are set up is that they measure the percentage of people that will not get symptomatic covid-19, so the only thing that is measured is whether they get symptoms or not. So the result is that 90% (within a confidence interval) of people who are given this vaccine will not develop any covid symptoms. Transmission may be impacted, and the data will reveal hints about this, but it's impossible to draw hard statistical conclusions about that, and in general a different type of vaccine technology will be needed to end transmission and thus the pandemic. This will save countless lives though, and may end lockdowns, so a great day nonetheless.
• evandijk70 6y ago
  Note that they provided 'Confirmed COVID-19 in Phase 2/3 participants without evidence of infection before vaccination [ Time Frame: From 7 days after the second dose of study intervention to the end of the study, up to 2 years ]' as their primary outcome in their study registration https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04368728 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04368728
• deleted 6y ago
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