Another slice of data-driven hope!

The New York Times puts out several free email newsletters with a curated summary of the most pressing news (according to their editors, of course, but I like the variety most days). The top story in today's The Morning newsletter directly addresses one of my recent concerns: vaccine effectiveness. I wish I could (legally) post the whole thing here. It's great! 

 

If you're concerned about the upcoming vaccines by J&J and Novavax being less effective than the Pfizer and Moderna ones, that's a perfectly valid concern. It's bothered me a little, especially with new variants circulating internationally. But it's important to know what "effective" means in research terms and how that translates into lives saved:

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The New York Times

The Morning

February 1, 2021

By David Leonhardt

Infections Aren't What Matter

"As Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me this weekend: “I don’t actually care about infections. I care about hospitalizations and deaths and long-term complications... 

 

The Data

"By those measures, all five of the vaccines — from Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Novavax and Johnson & Johnson — look extremely good. Of the roughly 75,000 people who have received one of the five in a research trial, not a single person has died from Covid, and only a few people appear to have been hospitalized. None have remained hospitalized 28 days after receiving a shot.

"To put that in perspective, it helps to think about what Covid has done so far to a representative group of 75,000 American adults: It has killed roughly 150 of them and sent several hundred more to the hospital. The vaccines reduce those numbers to zero and nearly zero, based on the research trials.

"Zero isn’t even the most relevant benchmark. A typical U.S. flu season kills between five and 15 out of every 75,000 adults and hospitalizes more than 100 of them.

"I assume you would agree that any vaccine that transforms Covid into something much milder than a typical flu deserves to be called effective. But that is not the scientific definition. When you read that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was 66 percent effective or that the Novavax vaccine was 89 percent effective, those numbers are referring to the prevention of all illness. They count mild symptoms as a failure.

“In terms of the severe outcomes, which is what we really care about, the news is fantastic,” Dr. Aaron Richterman, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, said...

The Variants

The biggest caveat is the possibility that future data will be less heartening. Johnson & Johnson and Novavax, for example, have issued press releases about their data, but no independent group has yet released an analysis. It will also be important to see much more data about how the vaccines interact with the variants.

But don’t confuse uncertainty with bad news. The available vaccine evidence is nearly as positive as it could conceivably be. And our overly negative interpretation of it is causing real problems.

Some people worry that schools cannot reopen even after teachers are vaccinated. Others are left with the mistaken impression that only the two vaccines with the highest official effectiveness rates — from Moderna and Pfizer — are worth getting.

In truth, so long as the data holds up, any of the five vaccines can save your life...."

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When you get a chance to get a vaccine, I encourage you to take it. Any of them. That is the fastest and most humane route to turning this worldwide pandemic into a mildly annoying childhood illness. If you have a favorite vaccine, it will still be around after herd immunity. No worries. Get what you can now and go back for seconds later, if you still feel so inclined :)

I'm just blown away that we have several very powerful vaccines being given to people within a year of Covid-19 shuttering our normal lives. That's a miracle.