Why you can't compare Covid-19 vaccines

‘In the US, the first two available Covid-19 vaccines were the ones from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna. Both vaccines have very high "efficacy rates," of around 95%. But the third vaccine introduced in the US, from Johnson & Johnson, has a considerably lower efficacy rate: just 66%.

‘Look at those numbers next to each other, and it's natural to conclude that one of them is considerably worse. Why settle for 66% when you can have 95%? But that isn't the right way to understand a vaccine's efficacy rate, or even to understand what a vaccine does. And public health experts say that if you really want to know which vaccine is the best one, efficacy isn't actually the most important number at all.’

View here (Vox, Youtube, Mar 20, 2021)

The scientist who’s been right about Covid-19 vaccines predicts what’s next

‘[Hilda] Bastian — an expert in analyzing clinical trial data, founding member of the Cochrane Collaboration, and a former National Institutes of Health official — has gone down rabbit holes before. There was the time she traveled the US on her own dime to research and take historical photos for a Wikipedia list of African American mathematicians.

‘But her obsession with vaccines in this pandemic has been especially fruitful: She’s called the race right at just about every turn...

‘Nearly a year into her project, I caught up with Bastian to ask where our blind spots are now and how she predicts the vaccine story — and the pandemic — will unfold. She talked about the need for health officials to acknowledge that coronavirus vaccines have potentially “big differences in efficacy and adverse events,” a time in the future when we may need Covid-19 vaccine boosters every year, and the problem of people in rich countries like the US shamelessly hogging vaccines.’

Read here (Vox, Feb 24, 2021)

Online scammers are rushing to exploit people desperate to get the Covid-19 vaccine

‘Many Americans are eager to get the Covid-19 vaccine as quickly as possible. But that inevitably means there are scammers ready to use the internet to take advantage of these vaccine seekers to steal their money and personal information.

‘Similar to earlier in the pandemic, when fraudsters flooded the internet with ads for sketchy “cures,” bogus Covid-19 tests, and scarce personal protective equipment, online schemers are now selling fake vaccine appointments and knockoff vaccine cards. (These cards document the date that vaccinated people received their doses, the manufacturer of their vaccine, and its batch number; they’re seen as a record of vaccination.)

‘Vaccine schemes are alarming. In late January, one man in Washington state was arrested after advertising fake Covid-19 vaccines online for as much as $1,000, and even injected people with an unknown substance, according to the Department of Justice, which is investigating these types of fraud cases.’

Read here (Vox, Feb 11, 2021)

How superspreading is fueling the pandemic — and how we can stop it

‘We now know that, on average, most people with the novel coronavirus pass the virus to just one other person, or to no one else at all. But some go on to infect many, many more, often before they even experience symptoms. Many of these transmission chains begin with “superspreading” events, where one person (usually in a crowded indoor space) passes the virus to dozens of others. Early contact tracing studies suggest these events have been a large driver of transmission around the world. By some estimates, 10 percent of people have been causing 80 percent of new infections.

This article tries to answer the following:

• Why is the coronavirus so good at superspreading?
• Are certain people more likely to be superspreaders?
• Why superspreading is more common at concerts than in libraries
• What should we be doing to limit superspreading?

Read here (Vox, Oct 3, 2020)

The US excess mortality rate from COVID-19 is substantially worse than Europe’s

‘The US has 4% of the world’s population but 21% of the global COVID-19-attributed infections and deaths. This column shows that when comparing excess mortality rates, a more robust way of reporting on pandemic deaths, Europe’s cumulative excess mortality rate from March to July is 28% lower than the US rate, contradicting the Trump administration’s claim that Europe’s rate is 33% higher. The US Northeast – the region most comparable with individual European countries – has experienced substantially worse excess mortality than Europe’s worst-affected countries. Had the US kept its excess mortality rate down to the level in Europe, around 57,800 American lives would have been saved.’

Read here (Vox EU, Sept 29, 2020)

Fauci: Coronavirus vaccine could be available by end of 2020

‘Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, told Congress Tuesday that he’s “cautiously optimistic” about the development of a coronavirus vaccine, saying that he believes one could be available as soon as the end of this year, or the beginning of 2021.’

Read here (Vox, June 23, 2020)

Bill Gates explains his plan to beat Covid-19

In an interview with Vox's editor-at-large Ezra Klein, Bill Gates covers a wide-ranging number of subjects on his interest and involvement in the prevention of pandemics; from history to the current issues of testing, treatments and vaccines, and from his current work to the conspiracy theories that surround it.

Read here (Vox, April 27, 2020)

I’ve read the plans to reopen the economy. They’re scary. There is no plan to return to normal

‘Over the past few days, I’ve been reading the major plans for what comes after social distancing. You can read them, too. There’s one from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, the left-leaning Center for American Progress, Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer.

‘I thought, perhaps naively, that reading them would be a comfort — at least then I’d be able to imagine the path back to normal. But it wasn’t. In different ways, all these plans say the same thing: Even if you can imagine the herculean political, social, and economic changes necessary to manage our way through this crisis effectively, there is no normal for the foreseeable future. Until there’s a vaccine, the US either needs economically ruinous levels of social distancing, a digital surveillance state of shocking size and scope, or a mass testing apparatus of even more shocking size and intrusiveness.’

Read here (Vox, April 10, 2020)