Tag: Insight

The Few Sentences That Explain Much of What Went Wrong With Our Pandemic Response

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.theinsight.org/p/the-few-sentences-that-explain-much

Excerpt:

Why did it take so long to accept that SARS-CoV-2 was being transmitted through aerosols, respiratory particles that are small enough to remain suspended in the air, rather than through short-range respiratory droplets that could not travel more than a few feet because of their (bigger) size?

The reasons for this delay go back more than a century, to the fight against (incorrect but prevalent) theories that blame miasma—noxious odors, especially from rotting organic material—for diseases. While trying to counter erroneous but millenia-long folk-beliefs, some of the founders of public health and the field of infectious control of diseases around the world made key errors and conflations around the turn of the 20th century. These errors essentially froze into tradition and dogma that went unchanged and uncorrected for more than a century, until a pandemic forced our hand.

Author(s): Zeynep Tufekci

Publication Date: 7 May 2021

Publication Site: Insight at substack

Vaccine Efficacy, Statistical Power and Mental Models

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://zeynep.substack.com/p/vaccine-efficacy-statistical-power

Excerpt:

 If that’s what the vaccine trials were measuring—the height of thewall that is our immune system comparing vaccine effectiveness would make a lot of sense.  Many high-profile, highly-credentialed people have been (misleadingly) describing it exactly in that manner: that if a vaccine is 95% effective, those 5% are left “unprotected.” If Moderna and Pfizer and 95% efficacious, and if Johnson and Johnson is 66%—well, that would mean that 34% of the people are left “unprotected.” right?

Wrong. To get to why that assumption is not right—and why those vaccine efficacy numbers are not the height of the wall that represents the immune system—let me first mention something important The two mRNA vaccines do appear to be spectacular, but they were tested under conditions where those pesky “variants-of-concern”—the B.117 (UK one) and B. 1.351 (South Africa) and P1–were not widespread. If tested now, under equal conditions, those numbers may be closer. Plus, Johnson & Johnson is a single-shot with a trial with a booster underway. So those efficacy numbers may well be much closer in reality than they appear from the trial results. But let’s leave that aside for a moment.

Author(s): Zeynep Tufekci

Publication Date: 2 March 2021

Publication Site: Insight on Substack