The blood clotting notwithstanding, I listened to the FiveThirtyEight Podcast-19 episode about AstraZeneca's vaccine efforts. It was interesting in recounting the efficacy controversy.
I'm not sure that AstraZeneca is totally persona non grata, but they deserve increased scrutiny with how they determined their efficacy and how selective they were in including certain data. That's one of the core issues with their vaccine.
IIRC, they claimed, early on, an efficacy in the high 70s. The Data and Safety Monitoring Board called them out for selectively including data and mentioning that with the extra data, it would lower their efficacy into the low 70s, and finally, more data was found that could have lowered efficacy to 69%. I think they're settling on a 74% efficacy rating, but still, the haggling over efficacy is concerning.
Whether leadership knew about this or not, they deserve to be scrutinized because they created a culture that would allow for this. Management is always culpable for every institutional failure.
Last I checked, the companies claiming 95% were measuring for COVID symptoms, but AZ was directly testing for infection. Most COVID patients are asymptomatic (especially vaccinated ones), so 74% and 95% suggest similar efficacy for the two groups of vaccines. (And so would a claim of 69% and of 79%)
I honestly don’t understand the controversy. As much as I like 538, their area of expertise is far outside medicine.
I'm not sure that AstraZeneca is totally persona non grata, but they deserve increased scrutiny with how they determined their efficacy and how selective they were in including certain data. That's one of the core issues with their vaccine.
IIRC, they claimed, early on, an efficacy in the high 70s. The Data and Safety Monitoring Board called them out for selectively including data and mentioning that with the extra data, it would lower their efficacy into the low 70s, and finally, more data was found that could have lowered efficacy to 69%. I think they're settling on a 74% efficacy rating, but still, the haggling over efficacy is concerning.
Whether leadership knew about this or not, they deserve to be scrutinized because they created a culture that would allow for this. Management is always culpable for every institutional failure.