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A subset of people in the AZ study were tested weekly. However the primary endpoint was prevention of symptomatic disease. For someone to count in the top line
by m-ee 6y ago
A subset of people in the AZ study were tested weekly. However the primary endpoint was prevention of symptomatic disease. For someone to count in the top line efficacy number they would have to show symptoms and test positive on PCR. This is roughly equivalent to what the other studies did, although exact definition of "symptomatic" and how they monitored that can be slightly different. There's a common perception I've seen a lot that the AZ numbers are sandbagged because it included asymptomatic cases but that's not the case. If someone never developed symptoms they don't factor in to the 60% efficacy number.
As the other commenter pointed it may be possible that someone had mild symptoms they were ignoring then tested positive on the weekly screening and said "oh yeah I do have a sore throat" but the numbers should still be roughly comparable. It's not worth diving into 94% vs 95% efficacy but I think we can be pretty confident that the 95% vaccine is more effective than the 60% vaccine.
This is also muddied because the AZ trials were a bit of a mess with dosing error and varying times between shots. So now we have a number of different subgroups with their own statistics but not a big enough sample size to say anything confidently about half dose vs full dose or 2 weeks vs 12 weeks. The confidence intervals are a mile wide, but they still get talked about (and even drive policy) adding a lot of noise to the discussion about how effective the vaccine really was.