Vaccine Efficacy Comparison
Here I’ve compiled the latest data I could find as of April 15 2021. I’m not an expert in any field related to vaccination, but since it’s time-consuming to sift through official online sources to find the latest relevant data, hopefully this can be helpful to some people. I’ve found it particularly time-consuming to hunt down the data on the efficacy of the vaccines in reducing severe disease, hospitalization and death, but websites aimed for the general public seem to almost entirely focus on just rates of symptomatic Covid-19 infections. If you’re like me and care much more about reducing severe disease, hospitalization and death, then you may find this data reassuring.
Caveats: reading any of the sources I cite here will give you more details and caveats about the data, the statistics I compile here are just my current opinion on what information is most salient from these sources. This is only meant as a summary or reference, and of course not a replacement for doing your own research. A large amount of information is compressed into small tables, which ignore the fact that the vaccines have different effects against different coronavirus variants, people of different age groups, etc., and new data is coming out all the time. I’ve left a question mark in cells of the tables where I haven’t yet been able to find a source with a value for the cell. I plan to keep updating this post over time with more information.
If you think that I’ve presented something false or presented it in a bad way, or your have a more recent source of data than I’ve included, please contact me by email at maxwellallman@gmail.com or by some other means.
The vaccines I’ve compared (so far) are AstraZeneca (AZ), Johnson & Johnson (J&J), Pfizer, and Moderna. Because the J&J vaccine is only one dose, I’ve included it in both of the following tables.
Finally, I’ll include a more editorial note on blood clot risk. One patient in the US has died from a blood clot that seems to have been caused by the J&J vaccine, out of 7 million doses administered. The AstraZeneca vaccine seems to have a slightly higher rate of causing death from blood clots. Given the death rate from Covid-19, you don’t need to carefully run the numbers to see that way more deaths will be caused by delaying administration of one or both of these vaccines, as the US has recently done with J&J. Furthermore, this delay may disproportionately affect lower-income or homeless communities who disproportionately have not had access to vaccinations yet, or would have more difficulty in getting a second dose as compared to the single dose of J&J. And finally, the bad publicity the vaccines are getting is causing terrible misinformation to spread. On this last point, YOU can help! Do your best to convince your friends, family, and anyone else that there’s (currently) no good reason to be worried about the blood clots.
I think the following graphic from News Center Maine does a nice simple job of illustrating this point (but it ignores the fact that the blood clots occur more in certain demographics, and the chance of death from Covid is based off the total number of deaths in the US population up until now.)
Sources:
1. https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/covid-19-vaccine-comparison (April 13th)
2. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7013e3.htm?s_cid=mm7013e3_w (April 2nd)
3. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2035389#article_citing_articles (Feb. 4th)
4. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2777172/ (March 1st)
5. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00528-6/fulltext (March 6th)
6. https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n612.full (March 2nd)
