The Coronavirus Vaccines Are “Home Runs”
The vaccines prevent severe disease, hospitalization, and death.
Preventing severe disease and death is the greatest value of a vaccine and a very personal benefit to each one of us. Achieving herd immunity — that is, stopping or at least greatly diminishing transmission of disease — is also a great value and a benefit for the entire community. On both scores, the three FDA-authorized COVID vaccines deserve to be called “home runs.”
The Pfizer- BioNTech Phase 3 trial enrolled over 43,000 volunteers; half of the volunteers received the vaccine; the other half received a placebo. Over a third of them were at risk for serious disease.
The “primary endpoint” of the study was the number of symptomatic infections that occurred in each group beginning seven days after the second dose of the vaccine. At that point in time, the volunteers were at the peak of their immune response to the vaccine.
The development of mild to moderate symptomatic infection occurred among eight volunteers in the vaccinated group and among 162 volunteers in the placebo group, for an efficacy rate of 95%.
The development of severe infection occurred only once in the vaccinated group compared to nine among the volunteers in the placebo group. There were no deaths…
