John Burn-Murdoch Profile picture
Nov 15, 2021 8 tweets 3 min read Read on X
NEW: @UKHSA study finds Pfizer booster is extremely effective against symptomatic infection, both compared to the unvaccinated and to those with 2 doses ft.com/content/8330da…

Whether first 2 doses were AZ or Pfizer, a Pfizer booster sends vaccine efficacy up to 93-94% 💪 Image
Study was on people aged 50+, comparing those boosted ~5+ months after dose 2, to those @ 5+ months unboosted.

AZ efficacy was 61% after dose 2, waning to 44% @ 5 months.

Pfizer was 82% after dose 2, waning to 63% @ 5 months.

2 wks after Pfizer booster, both groups -> 93-94%!
Best way to think about booster impact is not to look at going from 44 to 93 with AZ, i.e roughly doubling, but invert the numbers and go from (100-44) to (100-93), i.e from relative risk vs unvaxxed of 56% to just 7%

That’s an 87% increase in protection *relative to two doses!* Image
More importantly, level of protection after a booster is *much higher* than it was even at peak level just after second dose.

For AZ, relative risk just after dose 2 was 39%, now it’s 7% — an 82% reduction.

For Pfizer, RR just after d2 was 18%, now it’s 6% — a 67% reduction.
In other words, a booster isn’t just topping us back up to where we were after we got our second dose (and remember how invincible that felt?), it’s taking us to higher levels of protection than we’ve ever seen.
Of course, big question is whether we’ll look back on this as first in a regular series of boosters, or the 3rd dose of a three-dose vaccine.

The higher levels of protection hint at this being a new dose rather than just a recurring top-up, but more time and research are needed.
One more note: the new study (and all numbers I’ve quoted) are specific to symptomatic infection with the Delta variant.

And finally, a link to the study itself: khub.net/documents/1359…
Oh, and even though this study only looked at efficacy against infection, not hospitalisation or death, we would strongly expect the same pattern to emerge there, even if only as a function of infection risk falling (and thus fewer people being susceptible to severe disease).

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More from @jburnmurdoch

Apr 4
NEW 🧵

A quick thread of charts showing how Trump’s economic agenda is going so far:

1) Trump has had the same impact on economic uncertainty as a global pandemic. Image
2) That was just the US version.

What’s particularly impressive is that he’s managed this on a global scale.

Starting to get the feeling that “Trump” annotation is going to be the chart equivalent of a layer of volcanic ash in the fossil record. Image
3) US consumers are reacting very very negatively.

These are the worst ratings for any US government’s economic policy since records began. Image
Read 11 tweets
Mar 14
NEW 🧵: Is human intelligence starting to decline?

Recent results from major international tests show that the average person’s capacity to process information, use reasoning and solve novel problems has been falling since around the mid 2010s.

What should we make of this? Image
Nobody would argue that the fundamental biology of the human brain has changed in that time span. People’s underlying intellectual capacity is surely undimmed.

But there is growing evidence that the extent to which people can practically apply that capacity has been diminishing.
For such an important topic, there’s remarkably little long-term data on attention spans, focus etc.

But one source that has consistently tracked this is the Monitoring The Future survey, which finds a steep rise in the % of people struggling to concentrate or learn new things. Image
Read 15 tweets
Mar 7
NEW: The actions of Trump and Vance in recent weeks highlight something under-appreciated.

The American right is now ideologically closer to countries like Russia, Turkey and in some senses China, than to the rest of the west (even the conservative west). Image
In the 2000s, US Republicans thought about the world in similar ways to Britons, Europeans, Canadians.

This made for productive relationships regardless of who was in the White House.

The moderating layers around Trump #1 masked the divergence, but with Trump #2 it’s glaring. Image
In seven weeks Trump’s America has shattered decades-long western norms and blindsided other western leaders with abrupt policy changes.

This is because many of the values of Trump’s America are not the values of western liberal democracies.

My column: ft.com/content/304601…
Read 5 tweets
Feb 24
NEW: updated long-run gap in voting between young men and women in Germany:

The gender gap continues to widen, but contrary to what is often assumed, young men continue to vote roughly in line with the overall population, while young women have swung very sharply left. Image
Here’s my original analysis from last year: ft.com/content/29fd9b…
The key stats:

Young men’s AfD vote is somewhat higher than the national average (25% vs 21%), but their leftwing vote is also above average (15 vs 9).

Whereas young women’s AfD vote is significantly lower than average (14 vs 21), and leftwing vote far higher (34 vs 9).
Read 4 tweets
Nov 8, 2024
My wish for the next election is that poll trackers look like the one on the right 👉 not the left

This was yet another election where the polling showed it could easily go either way, but most of the charts just showed two nice clean lines, one leading and one trailing. Bad! Image
Pollsters and poll aggregators have gone to great lengths to emphasise the amount of uncertainty in the polls in recent weeks...

But have generally still put out charts and polling toplines that encourage people to ignore the uncertainty and focus on who’s one point ahead. Bad!
The thing about human psychology is, once you give people a nice clean number, it doesn’t matter how many times you say "but there’s an error margin of +/- x points, anything is possible".

People are going to anchor on that central number. We shouldn’t enable this behaviour!
Read 11 tweets
Nov 7, 2024
We’re going to hear lots of stories about which people, policies and rhetoric are to blame for the Democrats’ defeat.

Some of those stories may even be true!

But an underrated factor is that 2024 was an absolutely horrendous year for incumbents around the world 👇 Image
Harris lost votes, Sunak lost votes, Macron lost votes, Modi (!) lost votes, as did the Japanese, Belgian, Croatian, Bulgarian and Lithuanian governments in elections this year.

Any explanation that fails to take account for this is incomplete.

More here ft.com/content/e8ac09…
Did Biden hold on too long?

Has progressive politics alienated some Hispanic and Black men?

Yes and yes, but taking action to address those issues probably wouldn’t have produced a fundamentally different outcome.
Read 7 tweets

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