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% 💪
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!*
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.
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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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!
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!
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 👇
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.
Many of the NHS’s difficulties can be traced back to the deep cuts in manager numbers.
Fixing this doesn’t just unblock waiting lists, it also gives doctors more time to be doctors, and alleviates the stress and poor morale that come from having to do things that aren’t your job
Here’s another fun NHS low hanging fruit example:
A trial last year found that by running two operating theatres side by side, they cut the time between operations from 40 minutes to 2, and were able to do a week’s worth of surgeries in one day thetimes.com/uk/article/lon…
In what might be one of the most significant trends I have ever charted, the US obesity rate fell last year.
My column this week is about this landmark data point, and what might be behind it ft.com/content/21bd0b…
We already know from clinical trials that Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs produce sustained reductions in body weight, but with mass public usage taking off — one in eight US adults have used the drugs — the results may now be showing up at population level.
It’s really striking how the Corbynite left has migrated to the Greens.
The result is a curious coalition between the older and more Nimby environmentalist base, and the new hard left/progressive influx.
These are quite different people with quite different politics!
In 2019, one in ten Green voters was from the most progressive/left segment of voters; now that’s one in four.
Big difference in policy preferences, priorities and pressure on the leadership, as we’ve seen in e.g reaction to Denyer’s Biden statement.
The most glaring tension between these two types of Green is on decarbonisation, where the older Nimby base doesn’t want pylons *or even onshore wind farms* but many of the new progressive Green vote do.
Greens are actually less keen on wind farms than Labour and Lib Dem voters!