In the rush of all the announcements yesterday from the UK, it might be easy to miss this Public Health Scotland / Usher institute preprint on real world effectiveness of both the Ox/Az + BioNTech/Pfzier vaccine (Note: I am still on the trial for Ox/Az). ed.ac.uk/files/atoms/fi…
The most important thing is that they both work - really very well (age adjusted odds ratios getting down to 0.25 ish). If anything the Ox/Az is shading better to the Pfzier one but remember in a real world setting one doesn't have randomisation to help isolate the effect >>
This is clear evidence that both vaccines work - which we knew from trials, and for BioNTech/Pfzier real world Israel data; it shows also that effect works at the highest age ranges (for both vaccines) which was always expected but had thinner trial data in Ox/Az.
This real world efficacy data puts that question to bed pretty clearly - you can't get these odds ratios without a big biological effect.
There can be some vaccine snobbery that comes out on twitter and wide discourse which I don't get - the key questions are whether a vaccines is (a) safe (b) works and (c) available. It is simply great that we have 3 such cases, and more coming.
The real world efficacy vs SARS-CoV-2 variants is going to be the next phase, and here deep testing alongside deep vaccination (UK, Israel) is going to be the key proving ground.
But - we should celebrate the innovation of scientists in Moderna, BioNtech, Oxford Jenner, and trialists/production delivery of AstraZeneca, Pfzier and Moderna in having these tools at our disposal.
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