i understand the methodology. do you understand the result? if the vaccine works for you, for as long as antibodies are active, you are 100% immune. you do not have a 5% risk of getting the disease, you have a 0% chance, you are immune. if it does not work for you, you are not immune and have exactly the same risk you did before taking it.
do we know exactly for whom it will work and who not? no. so we can’t tell any specific person you have no chance of getting the disease because we don’t know if they’re part of the 95% or the 5%.
This, while different from the original discussion, is also wrong.
People are not 100% immune from the disease. Things like time of exposure, size of the exposure, state of the person’s immune system at the time of exposure, and of course state of vaccinated, all contribute to an exposed person’s likelihood of developing the disease.
It is not a lottery, and some people who draw the long straw can’t ever get covid. That’s just not how it works.
For all these reasons, you cannot interpret the percents the way that you are.
You are misunderstanding the definition we are using. We are not saying that 5% will get infected. The number is much, much lower than that. When it is stated that a vaccine has a 95% efficacy rating it means that the vaccinated have a 95% lower chance of being infected. Here is the real-world data from the Phase 3 Pfizer trials -
Out of 21,830 unvaccinated people 162 got infected. Out of 21,830 vaccinated people 8 people got infected. So you are 95% less likely to catch covid if you are vaccinated. The actual % of vaccinated people who caught covid was 0.04%. I believe the phase 3 trial ran 3 monhts. That means in a year you’d have a 0.16% chance of catching covid.
I’ve posted a link that backs this up, as have others. I have yet to see you post a link that supports your defintiion.
no, i am still right. you are arguing methodology, i am not. i am stating the result. we say that if your vaxed you have a 95% lower risk, thats because we don’t know if the vaccine worked unless you actually get covid and then know it did not. if it works, for as long as you have active antibodies you are immune.
No, I’m arguing both methodology and interpretation.
What the 95% means is, in the study 95% fewer vaccinated people got sick compared to non vaccinated people.
This does not translate to ‘95% are immune while they have antibodies’.
(Side note - no matter your antibody state, you are never 100% immune. Viral load, exposure time, and state of your immune system among other things will effect your immunity. I promise you, someone fully vaccinated with antibodies who is locked in a room with 20 symptomatic covid positive people for 5 days can and most likely will get covid.)
GO back to the example…
Let’s look at a hypothetical example. Let’s say 2,000 people take part in a vaccine trial. Of these, 1,000 get the vaccine and 1,000 get the placebo. Now let’s say that by the end of the trial, a total of 500 people get sick: 475 from the placebo group and 25 from the vaccinated group. Expressed as a percentage, 47.5% of unvaccinated people got sick, versus just 2.5% of vaccinated people.
From there, we figure out efficacy with an easy formula: the risk in the unvaccinated group, minus the risk among the vaccinated, divided by the risk among unvaccinated.
47.5 – 2.5 / 47.5 = 0.95
Your interoperation is 95% of the 500 vaccine recepiants have 100% immunity.
But 97.5% of the 500 didn’t get covid. And 2.5% did. How would they know exactly 2.5% of the 500 did not have immunity but just didn’t get sick?
They couldn’t possibly know that. If could be an addition 10% did not have immunity and didn’t get sick for other reasons. It could be 50%. It could be 0%.
That is simply NOT what they are claiming because the methodology can’t possibly prove it.
They instead are presenting the fact that 95% fewer people in the vaccine group got sick compared to the number of placebos that got sick.
95% of the 1000 are immune. (so long as the antibodies last)
again, your example is the methodology for how efficacy is determined, not the result. the conclusion of this methodology is not a restatement of the methodology, it is a conclusion based on it. is it perfect? no, none are, but its as close as we can get.
if everybody had a 5% risk, everyone would eventually get the disease. some tomorrow, some next week, some later. when is impossible to determine, but eventually that 5% risk would catch up to you. so where are the thousands of polio victims? we don’t have them. why? because 96% of the people have no risk, the vaccine worked and they are 100% immune. for the 4% it doesn’t work for, they can get polio if they are exposed. if everyone had a 4% risk, there would be a lot of polio around.
No one is 100% immune because they got the vaccine. This is where your premise falls apart. The vaccine does not confer 100% or complete immunity. No one vaccine has or will…maybe one day down the road… but not now.
The 1000 who got vaccinated have a 95% chance of not getting Covid versus those In the placebo group. Being vaccinated lowers your risk of getting COVID by 95 %. Which are still incredible odds. If I can lower my risk of getting COVID by 95%. Man, I take that bet.
the conclusion is not a restatement of the methodology, which is all he’s done. i know the methodolgy, you apparently don’t know how to apply the result in real life.
i’ll say it again.
95% efficacy means that 95% of the people vaccinated are 100% immune for as long as the antibodies last. and that 5% of those vaccinated gain no immunity. we say to all of them, that they have 95% lower risk because we have no idea whether any given person is in the 95% or the 5%. so as a whole, its true, on an individual basis, its not. on an individual basis either the vaccine works for you or it doesn’t
