Which is better than Pfizer or Moderna and possible a more interesting/useful metric to base things on. We probably should be judging effectiveness on a single measure!Importantly it has been reported that of those vaccinated in the trial, none who contracted Covid-19 developed serious symptoms and none were hospitalised.
None of the vaccines have been tested on those with comorbidities (I.e. those with another illness pre existing condition). While they may have been tested on older people (70-85 in the "Oxford" case) they haven't been tested on the more vulnerable older people where a large number of the deaths and hospitalisations have been occurring and we have no idea how much the vaccine will be effective in that group. Hence lots of people might be being more optimistic than they should.Looking at the average age and general health of those who die from (or is it with, nobody knows!) Covid-19, what will vaccinating them achieve? Have the vaccines even been tested on the most vulnerable (and I don’t mean healthy 60 year olds who aren’t actually vulnerable)? It was something my GF said this morning that got me thinking about this, but should we expect to see a huge reduction in excess deaths next year?
The net result is that there will probably need to be a phase 2 vaccination programme where the 16/18-60 age group are targeted to reduce the general case rate so the chance of the vulnerable coming into contact with an infected person is lower.
The effectiveness is measuring the reduction in infection rate of those vaccinated, there isn't any data on transmission apart from a sub-set of the oxford trial (not published).
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