All Vaccines for COVID-19 Are More Effective Than Those for the Flu ⇥ vox.com

Dylan Scott, Vox:

But that good news has been dampened somewhat because the media has focused on another number: efficacy, or how effective the vaccines are in preventing any illness at all, however mild it is. Viewed through that prism, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine (with a 66 percent efficacy rate) looks substantially worse than Pfizer/BioNTech’s or Moderna’s (both 95 percent efficacious).

But I’ll let you in on a secret: Even the 66 percent efficacy rate is an impressive result. You need only look at seasonal flu vaccines for proof.

Zeynep Tufekci, the Atlantic:

What went wrong? The same thing that’s going wrong right now with the reporting on whether vaccines will protect recipients against the new viral variants. Some outlets emphasize the worst or misinterpret the research. Some public-health officials are wary of encouraging the relaxation of any precautions. Some prominent experts on social media — even those with seemingly solid credentials — tend to respond to everything with alarm and sirens. So the message that got heard was that vaccines will not prevent transmission, or that they won’t work against new variants, or that we don’t know if they will. What the public needs to hear, though, is that based on existing data, we expect them to work fairly well — but we’ll learn more about precisely how effective they’ll be over time, and that tweaks may make them even better.

A year into the pandemic, we’re still repeating the same mistakes.

We lack existing domestic production capacity for these vaccines in Canada, so we’re having to import our entire supply from Europe — at least until manufacturing facilities are completed. That means we have had hiccups in our rollout compared to the United States, where around two million doses are being administered every day now. We have vaccinated at about 20% of the rate of the U.S. so far.

But it sounds like many hiccups have been sorted out, and we’ll be fully vaccinated by the “end of the summer”. I cannot wait to see live music again.