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> That is not and never has been - up until literally a few months ago - the definition of vaccine efficacy I remember something else. At least where I live, s

> That is not and never has been - up until literally a few months ago - the definition of vaccine efficacy I remember something else. At least where I live, since the very beginning of the vaccination programme, people were advised to not wait for Pfizer and Moderna vacinnes that were in short supply, but use already widely available AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines because even though their efficacy against transmission was significantly lower, they still provided very good protection against severe illness; and that protection was always being explicitly stressed out as the most important.

native_samples 5y ago
e.g. https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/documents/ncov/covid-wwksf/2021/04/wwksf-vaccine-effectiveness.pdf?la=en https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/documents/ncov/co... "All of the COVID-19 vaccines approved for use in Canada are effective at preventing symptomatic SARS-CoV infection and COVID-19 related hospitalizations and death." Because the phrase vaccine efficacy just means how good is a vaccine at something it can be defined relative to any endpoint you want. Nonetheless, both the way the term "vaccine" has been used historically and the way "vaccine efficacy" was being used as recently as this spring were in terms of, it will prevent you from getting infected and sick. The original claim was that "vaccine efficacy is NOT against transmission" and that this is merely updated information, not an attempt to rewrite history. But it certainly looks that way to a lot of us because to truly accept that the previously distributed information was wrong would imply a major screwup and thus some sort of investigation and accountability. At minimum it means trial failure, for one thing. The pharma companies claimed the trials showed they could prevent COVID-19. They were wrong. That implies other claims made by the trials could be wrong, which implies the government should suspend the rollout until the true facts about what the vaccines actually do can be established. Obviously no such logic is appearing anywhere in public health. Instead the message has simply shifted to be, vaccines prevent "severe illness and death" and that's why they're awesome and always were. The Pfizer trial at least, didn't actually show that however.

native_samples 5y ago

e.g. https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/documents/ncov/covid-wwksf/2021/04/wwksf-vaccine-effectiveness.pdf?la=en https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/documents/ncov/co... "All of the COVID-19 vaccines approved for use in Canada are effective at preventing symptomatic SARS-CoV infection and COVID-19 related hospitalizations and death." Because the phrase vaccine efficacy just means how good is a vaccine at something it can be defined relative to any endpoint you want. Nonetheless, both the way the term "vaccine" has been used historically and the way "vaccine efficacy" was being used as recently as this spring were in terms of, it will prevent you from getting infected and sick. The original claim was that "vaccine efficacy is NOT against transmission" and that this is merely updated information, not an attempt to rewrite history. But it certainly looks that way to a lot of us because to truly accept that the previously distributed information was wrong would imply a major screwup and thus some sort of investigation and accountability. At minimum it means trial failure, for one thing. The pharma companies claimed the trials showed they could prevent COVID-19. They were wrong. That implies other claims made by the trials could be wrong, which implies the government should suspend the rollout until the true facts about what the vaccines actually do can be established. Obviously no such logic is appearing anywhere in public health. Instead the message has simply shifted to be, vaccines prevent "severe illness and death" and that's why they're awesome and always were. The Pfizer trial at least, didn't actually show that however.