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发帖数: 1 | 1 So it looks like the vaccine has a very strong protective effect, and that’
s the first thing you’d want to know. But there are many other things we
don’t know yet. What, for example, is its effect on transmission of the
disease? We should be seeing more on that early next year, but based on
these figures, it seems very likely that this vaccination would cut down the
transmission rate sharply. But that has to be proven; there are plenty of
things that have seemed very likely over the years in drug development that
haven’t worked out. Even at this point in the pandemic, we don’t have
solid numbers about the correlation between just what sort of viral load a
person is carrying and their infectiousness to others. Think about how you’
d try to design such a study and you can see why the data are lacking! We
also don’t know the effectiveness of the vaccine in preventing asymptomatic
infections, because this trial was based on symptoms, not on constant PCR
testing of its participants, which is the only way you’d accumulate such
data. The stronger knockdown of severe cases makes one think that
asymptomatic cases might be similarly decreased, but you could also imagine
that you would take what would be “normal” symptomatic cases and knock
them back to being real-but-asymptomatic ones. A priori, you can’t be sure
what the real situation is. That question is tied up with the transmission
one, of course. We also don’t know what the duration of protection is, for
the very simple reason that time just has to keep on tickin’, tickin’,
into the future, (S. Miller et al.) for us to have any data on that. There’
s no other way; we can’t estimate these things. That we will certainly have
data on – eventually. | J*****3
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