Covid-19 vaccine effectiveness at creating variants

COVID-19 vaccine

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia             August 9, 2021

Efficacy

 

Vaccine efficacy is the reduction in risk of getting the disease by vaccinated participants in a controlled trial compared with the risk of getting the disease by unvaccinated participants.[174] An efficacy of 0% means that the vaccine does not work (identical to placebo). An efficacy of 50% means that there are half as many cases of infection as in unvaccinated individuals.[citation needed]

The vaccine's efficacy may be adversely effected if the arm is held improperly or squeezed so the vaccine is injected subcutaneously instead of into the muscle.[551][552] The CDC guidance is to not repeat doses that are administered subcutaneously.[553]

It is not straightforward to compare the efficacies of the different vaccines because the trials were run with different populations, geographies, and variants of the virus.[554] In the case of COVID‑19, a vaccine efficacy of 67% may be enough to slow the pandemic, but this assumes that the vaccine confers sterilizing immunity, which is necessary to prevent transmission. Vaccine efficacy reflects disease prevention, a poor indicator of transmissibility of SARS‑CoV‑2 since asymptomatic people can be highly infectious.[555] The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) set a cutoff of 50% as the efficacy required to approve a COVID‑19 vaccine, with the lower limit of the 95% confidence interval being greater than 30%.[556][557][558] Aiming for a realistic population vaccination coverage rate of 75%, and depending on the actual basic reproduction number, the necessary effectiveness of a COVID-19 vaccine is expected to need to be at least 70% to prevent an epidemic and at least 80% to extinguish it without further measures, such as social distancing.[559]

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On March 6, 2021, vaccine developer Geert Vanden Bossche, who worked as senior Ebola program manager with the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization in Geneva, published a paper that predicted potentially more dangerous variants to appear: “There can be no doubt that continued mass vaccination campaigns will enable new, more infectious viral variants to become increasingly dominant and ultimately result in a dramatic incline in new cases despite enhanced vaccine coverage rates. There can be no doubt either that this situation will soon lead to complete resistance of circulating variants to the current vaccines.”

Dr. Joseph Mercola explained that just as antibiotics breed resistance in bacteria, vaccines put evolutionary pressure on viruses to speed up mutations and create more virulent and dangerous variants.

“Viruses mutate all the time, and if you have a vaccine that doesn’t block infection completely, then the virus will mutate to evade the immune response within that person. That is one of the distinct features of the COVID shots — they’re not designed to block infection. They allow infection to occur and at best lessen the symptoms of that infection.”

 

Effectiveness

The real-world studies of vaccine effectiveness measure to which extent a certain vaccine has succeeded in preventing COVID-19 infection, symptoms, hospitalization and death for the vaccinated individuals in a large population under routine conditions that are less than ideal.[580]

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Does the level of obfuscation created by the authorities affect vaccine effectiveness?

Variants

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This section's factual accuracy may be compromised due to out-of-date information. The reason given is: Information taken from WHO's COVID-19 Weekly Epidemiological Update is outdated and inaccurate. The latest version now is July 20, edition 49. Please update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. (July 2021)
File:WHO EN 3 Working Together 03Mar2021.webm
 
World Health Organization video describing how variants proliferate in unvaccinated areas.
See also: Variants of SARS-CoV-2

The interplay between the SARS-CoV-2 virus and its human hosts was initially natural but is now being altered by the prompt availability of vaccines.[608] The potential emergence of a SARS-CoV-2 variant that is moderately or fully resistant to the antibody response elicited by the COVID-19 vaccines may necessitate modification of the vaccines.[609] Trials indicate many vaccines developed for the initial strain have lower efficacy for some variants against symptomatic COVID-19.[610] As of February 2021, the US Food and Drug Administration believed that all FDA authorized vaccines remained effective in protecting against circulating strains of SARS-CoV-2.[609]

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