Vaccine effectiveness, what do those numbers mean?

We know the Moderna/Pfizer vaccines are told to be 95% effective, and the Johnson and Johnson one shot is at least 70% effective.  What does this mean?

Why is Johnson and Johnson’s vaccine good enough and why are they doing additional trials?

We are also being bombarded with news of variants that are causing secondary infections in some people who already had covid-19.  Should you worry or is this just clickbait?

With the newest CDC recommendations that it is safe for people who have been vaccinated to get together in small groups, the road to normal is closer than you may believe.  Truthfully, people who have been vaccinated or had covid have already been doing this but now those recommendations are official.

We recommend everyone who has not had covid-19 become vaccinated.  These vaccines will be increasing in supply as they become more widely available this month so getting an appointment should get much easier.

The NY Times recently published an article discussing vaccine effectiveness and what the numbers actually mean. Check it out below

What Do Vaccine Efficacy Numbers Actually Mean?

By Carl Zimmer and Keith CollinsMarch 3, 2021

This week, Johnson & Johnson began delivering millions of doses of its coronavirus vaccine across the United States after receiving an emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration. Central to getting the green light was a trial that Johnson & Johnson ran to measure the vaccine’s efficacy.

Efficacy is a crucial concept in vaccine trials, but it’s also a tricky one. If a vaccine has an efficacy of, say, 95 percent, that doesn’t mean that 5 percent of people who receive that vaccine will get Covid-19. And just because one vaccine ends up with a higher efficacy estimate than another in trials doesn’t necessarily mean it’s superior. Here’s why.

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