Covid-19 vaccines do not reduce your risk by 95% or anything close to that. By hyping the 95%+ efficacy value, the CDC is being deceptive and unethical because they know that most people will interpret 95% efficacy as being 95% safe from covid-19. In other words, believing that you are 95% safe from covid-19 after taking the vaccines is completely wrong.
The absolute risk reduction (ARR) of Pfizer or Moderna is 0.4%-0.7%
ARR is the metric that attempts to capture how much a vaccine reduces the overall risk to an individual to get the disease.
The usual suspects are reporting vax efficacy in terms of relative risk reduction (RRR) without mentioning ARR. RRR is always higher than the ARR.
E.g., if 5% of the control group gets sick and 1% of the test group gets sick, the ARR is 5% - 1% = 4%. RRR is calculated differently. In this example the RRR is 4%/5% = 80%
It is deceptive and unethical to report/publicize the RRR without the context provided by the ARR. Especially when employing experimental/emergency treatments that require higher standard of informed consent than approved treatments.
But since in this case the vax manufacturers nor the government can be sued or otherwise help accountable, violating informed consent rules is no big deal I guess.
I wonder why they do it? I guess “95% efficacy” sounds better to the ear than “less than 1% risk reduction.”
“Outcome Reporting Bias in COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Clinical Trials”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7996517/
Interesting but...
“A Marm Kilpatrick
@DiseaseEcology
·
Feb 11
... Accounting for two revisions above increases efficacy estimates a tiny bit, but it’s lost in rounding estimates to avoid over-precision:
Infection: 90% (86%-93%)
Transmission: 91% (82%-96%) “
So, an independent, knowledgeable person gives the vaccine a 90% efficacy against the virus.
But honestly, the ARR figure is interesting.
Finally found something on ARR.
The comment section is helpful.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/04/12/relative-vs-absolute-risk-reduction-500-doctors-want-to-know/
“We are fortunate to live in a time when the ARR of a smallpox vaccine is zero. Even one with an RRR of 100%. But that is largely because a high-RRR vaccine was administered globally for decades when any measure of the ARR was vanishingly close to zero.”
Shows why I don’t find it useful.
But there is informed discussion form both sides there.