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tdavidagarim t1_irad33c wrote

>they did all sorts of studies on death/harm reduction, immunity, and things like that

Yep and just so you know, these studies weren't done in a lab: they ran clinical trials over the course of a year with thousands of volunteers, to test the vaccines in real people in the real population in real life.

Source: I was one of them for the Oxford vaccine trial.

Had antibody tests first, then received a jab (either the vaccine or a placebo, it was 50/50 in my blind study) in early June 2020 and had to take weekly PCR tests, blood tests at various intervals, and report on my health regularly for 12 months. They then compared this data from the however-many-thousand volunteers against the infection, hospitalisation, and mortality rates amongst the general population in order to arrive at the efficacy rating.

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[deleted] OP t1_iradlww wrote

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tdavidagarim t1_iraghgc wrote

This is one of the latest papers I was shared with by the Oxford email comms: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14760584.2022.2092472

>"The most-studied COVID-19 vaccines provide consistently high (>90%) protection against serious clinical outcomes like hospitalizations and deaths, regardless of variant"

>"We found that the three most-studied vaccines, BNT162b2, mRNA-1273, and AZD1222, had a high and comparable overall VE against symptomatic infections (average >77%)"

This paper was a review of 79 separate real-world studies into vaccine efficacy in several countries ("Most of the data (28 studies) were from North America where BNT162b2 was the most-studied vaccine, followed by mRNA-1273 and AZD1222")

Seems to find that the 3 major vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna and Oxford/Astra-Zeneca) were broadly comparable and all provided around 90% protection against serious outcomes and 77% overall protection against infection, which they say was comparable across all three. The tables and figures in the paper break it down more into useful categories that I won't attempt to type up in here :)

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Kayback2 t1_irabrjt wrote

There have been a couple studies and a couple of meta study of studies that show they are safe, they do work and they are a good thing to get, however real world efficacy are closer to 60- 70% protection as opposed to 80-90% they were talking about.

https://www.rivm.nl/en/covid-19-vaccination/questions-and-background-information/efficacy-and-protection

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hammermuffin t1_irai4ac wrote

Iirc, the 70% efficacy is for preventing infection, while the 90% efficacy is for preventing hospitalizations/deaths, based on the newest studies/meta-analyses

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NotAnotherEmpire t1_iraf0km wrote

The efficacy was heavily impacted by which variant was at issue. The two-dose vaccines remained highly effective against Delta even with waning. That was really, really good in the real world. Two dose wasn't effective against Omicron infection but the booster improved that.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2796615

That Delta success is impressive as it didn't exist when the vaccines were developed and was a materially more severe threat.

Omicron is so different it likely wouldn't be classified as a "variant" if it and the original SARS-CoV-2 had been discovered outside a pandemic context.

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marr75 t1_iram7mu wrote

Depends on what you mean by effective. This article summarizes and links a few quality studies.

For symptomatic Omicron infections: 2 dose ~50-60% effective, 3-dose ~70-80% effective, 4-dose ~90% effective. The death rate was not reliably calculable in these studies because it was so low for all groups. So, is 50% efficacy against symptomatic infection, [some very high efficacy]% against death/severe illness "effective"? It certainly slows the spread and keeps a lot of people alive. Plus there's strong evidence you could "choose your own efficacy", if you were higher risk or just didn't want the hassle of symptomatic Covid, you could choose first and second boosters.

For reference, the flu vaccine, which is becoming a better comparison as we have vaccines against this family of coronavirii and they have become endemic (there's a smaller and smaller population with no prior immunity) is typically 40-60% effective against the most common strains of flu each year.

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