Statistical secrets of Covid-19 vaccines

The old question is in the world of public health: do all of these numbers exceed whether they help people. But it seems that more and more information about vaccines is alleviating doubts rather than exacerbating them. It’s about how people view their risk profiles. “If you get Covid, you get 100% Covid and if you don’t, it’s 0% Covid,” Olliaro says. “You have to consider the perspective of the individual within the community.”

One of them the characteristics of the pandemic have been that it affects different groups of people in different ways. In the US, poor people and people of color are much easier to get sick and die with Covid-19z than white and rich people. The elderly are at greater risk than the young.

Like all other medical interventions ever, vaccines also have risks and benefits. J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines have been associated with very rare severe blood clots, which last month disrupted the use of the U.S. J&J vaccine. People with severe allergies may be more likely to experience anaphylactic shock with two-dose mRNA-based vaccines.

All of these complications create fog around the decision space, making some people’s risk-benefit calculations more complex or creating a space for people who perceive that they are at lower risk as a result of Covid-19 or are more concerned about side effects. they have to be there to think it’s okay not to get vaccinated. “Most people aren’t sitting there with numbers that are concerned with the decimal number,‘ I’m going to weigh the risk-benefit relationship, ’says Alexandra Freeman, director of the Winton Center for Risk & Evidence Communication. University of Cambridge. But just because most people don’t do math doesn’t mean they don’t chew the problem. As Freeman puts it, “risk is very subjective.”

So okay, let’s talk about these blood clots. Freeman’s team put together a series of infographics that woven some of these threads into a usable rug. Instead of comparing the risk of getting Covid and the risk of getting vaccinated — the problem with apple oranges — they published document The risk of blood clots in the AstraZeneca vaccine compared to its actual benefit, preventing the number of uses of Covid-related intensive care units. They were then determined by age group and exposure risk. (In real life, the risk of exposure would vary from country to country as well as profession … and the team took 80% of the vaccine’s effectiveness, the necessary simplification … and used a fixed duration of 16 weeks, all of which vary over time. as infection rates decrease and decrease. Statistics!)

According to 100,000 people at low risk of exposure, it has been estimated that the AstraZeneca vaccine is expected to cause blood clots in 1.1 people and only 0.8 IUDs. If you are looking for only one type of person, AstraZeneca seems to be the reason to avoid the vaccine and in fact European regulators have limited its use. Fortunately, there are all these other vaccines.

At the other extreme, among people at high risk for exposure (for example, many infections live in their region, for example) between the ages of 60 and 69, the vaccine can cause only 0.2 cases of blood clots (it seems to affect mostly younger people), but 127 They keep 7 people out of the ICU. It gives a gross case. In most Winton Center teams, the risks of the AstraZeneca vaccine are bearing fruit.

Again, though The US and Europe empowered companies to evaluate these vaccines. Each used slightly different protocols and different populations. A multi-arm study of all of them could clear up those statistical kinks. WHO really is he announced Such a trial in 2020; it seems that nothing has come out of it.