Why are manufacturers’ claims about vaccine effectiveness misleading? Pfizer and Moderna declined to share with the public the fact that there is another way to parse their data that has more real-world significance.
Examining a statistic called
absolute risk reduction — the number of percentage points that an individual’s risk goes down if they do something “protective” — the two companies’
COVID vaccines barely make a dent at all, reducing someone’s risk of experiencing COVID symptoms (the clinical trials’ endpoint) by less than 1%. This is the practical number that people are likely to care about most.
SOURCE
