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_heimdall • today at 10:33 AM • 1 reply • view on HN

The paper I shared actually doesn't support the claim of preventing infection.

The trials showed a minimal risk of adverse responses to the injection itself and what appeared to be a reduced rate of symptoms. The trials didn't cover impact on infection rates at all, that would have required proactively testing every participant for infection which wasn't done. The trials only followed self reported symptoms, meaning all the study can indicate is a correlation with reduced symptomatic infection.

Replies

defrost • today at 11:11 AM

The paper linked shows a reduced rate of COVID in the pool of people that received a vaccine candidate compared to the pool that received a placebo:

  A total of 43,548 participants underwent randomization, of whom 43,448 received injections:
    21,720 with BNT162b2 and 
    21,728 with placebo.
  There were 8 cases of Covid-19 with onset at least 7 days after the second dose among participants assigned to receive BNT162b2 and 162 cases among those assigned to placebo;

  BNT162b2 was 95% effective in preventing Covid-19
Again, no vaccine ever really 100% prevents infection - what they do is reduce the number and severity of cases. Vaccines are literally created to increase the human bodies ability to fight off infection - efficacy varies by age and many other factors.