2021/5/13 I’ve now had a chance to look into variants. Based on: (1) the result from this large study from Qatar, (2) the current prevalences of variants in the US, and (3) the assumption that other variants of concern are no more vaccine-resistant than B.1.351, (4) the current prevalence of variants in the US as per outbreak.info, I conclude that vaccine effective I believe that vaccine effectiveness against getting Covid at all is reduced by a factor of 0.95; however, vaccine-effectiveness against severe disease and death is probably not reduced.
In conclusion, within the United States, I believe that the results of this overall still hold. Huzzah!
2021/4/24 I’ve now spent some time looking into variants and how they might affect vaccine effectiveness. Currently, it seems clear that: (1) certain variants are already pretty widespread and gaining in prevalence in quickly, (2) some of those variants have lab/in- vitro evidence of decreased effectiveness. What is unclear is the real-world clinical significance. I don’t know enough immunology and haven’t read enough to know.
In my current poor epistemic state of ignorance, I would currently guess that vaccines offer somewhat less than 99% effectiveness (for young people against symptomatic), but probably still pretty high, say upwards of 80% or even 90%. And effectiveness against more severe cases is probably still higher. But everything lower confidence than when I wrote this post.
If I can get the chance, I’ll look into this more and provide more updates. For those interested, outbreak.info is an utterly amazing source of data on variants and mutations–both dashboards and collections of relevant papers.
2021/4/22
I removed a short section discussing different false-positive rates among different levels of severity that I now think was confused, following the exchange in this thread.
2021/4/17
I added a subsection in the Objections section discussing how the vaccine and control groups in the big Israeli study might be different, and how this should widen confidence intervals.
Updates / Changelog
2021/5/13
I’ve now had a chance to look into variants. Based on: (1) the result from this large study from Qatar, (2) the current prevalences of variants in the US, and (3) the assumption that other variants of concern are no more vaccine-resistant than B.1.351, (4) the current prevalence of variants in the US as per outbreak.info, I conclude that vaccine effective I believe that vaccine effectiveness against getting Covid at all is reduced by a factor of 0.95; however, vaccine-effectiveness against severe disease and death is probably not reduced.
In conclusion, within the United States, I believe that the results of this overall still hold. Huzzah!
2021/4/24
I’ve now spent some time looking into variants and how they might affect vaccine effectiveness. Currently, it seems clear that: (1) certain variants are already pretty widespread and gaining in prevalence in quickly, (2) some of those variants have lab/in- vitro evidence of decreased effectiveness. What is unclear is the real-world clinical significance. I don’t know enough immunology and haven’t read enough to know.
In my current poor epistemic state of ignorance, I would currently guess that vaccines offer somewhat less than 99% effectiveness (for young people against symptomatic), but probably still pretty high, say upwards of 80% or even 90%. And effectiveness against more severe cases is probably still higher. But everything lower confidence than when I wrote this post.
If I can get the chance, I’ll look into this more and provide more updates. For those interested, outbreak.info is an utterly amazing source of data on variants and mutations–both dashboards and collections of relevant papers.
2021/4/22
I removed a short section discussing different false-positive rates among different levels of severity that I now think was confused, following the exchange in this thread.
2021/4/17
I added a subsection in the Objections section discussing how the vaccine and control groups in the big Israeli study might be different, and how this should widen confidence intervals.