Slow Boring

Share this post

Vaccines are better than you think — plus Robinhood, schools, and hurricanes

www.slowboring.com

Vaccines are better than you think — plus Robinhood, schools, and hurricanes

A Saturday fast takes roundup

Matthew Yglesias
Jan 30, 2021
126
310
Share this post

Vaccines are better than you think — plus Robinhood, schools, and hurricanes

www.slowboring.com

Happy Saturday — here’s some quick takes.

Vaccines are really good

When you read in the press that a vaccine is 90 percent effective vs another one that’s only 70 percent effective, do you know what that means? It turns out that what everyone is measuring in their Covid trials is the share of people in the control group who develop symptoms vs the share of people in the treatment group. That focus on symptoms has a bad news aspect that’s been widely publicized — they measured symptoms rather than doing constant PCR tests so some of the vaccinated people may have had asymptotic infections, and it’s possible that vaccinated people can still spread the virus.

Less widely publicized is the good news: None of the people in the Pfizer/Moderna treatment groups died or even fell seriously ill and had to be hospitalized.

This is typical of vaccines. For virology reasons that I don’t really understand, flu vaccines have very low efficacy as measured in this way. One of the main reasons doctors r…

Keep reading with a 7-day free trial

Subscribe to Slow Boring to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.

Already a paid subscriber? Sign in
© 2023 Matthew Yglesias
Privacy ∙ Terms ∙ Collection notice
Start WritingGet the app
Substack is the home for great writing