Q&A of the Day – How Effective are the Newly Approved COVID-19 Vaccines?
Bottom Line: The answer to your question is an easy one. We don’t know. And the reason we don’t know what the efficacy (at either prevention or at reducing severe symptoms) of these vaccines happen to be is because they were approved by federal agencies without any human clinical data. I know, fun thought, right? A quick note though, you’d mentioned that the original vaccines weren’t as effective as they’d originally been purported to be. That’s about half true. The original Moderna and Pfizer vaccines did prove to be approximately 95% effective at prevention. The fly in that ointment, or vaccine as the case happened to be, was that it was 95% against the original strain of the virus. With every successive strain of the virus, the vaccines lost efficacy at prevention until essentially not having any in that regard more recently. What was especially misleading was the miscalculation by health authorities that we might be one and done with vaccines and COVID-19. There’s a lot more to this story and it’s worth talking about – so I’ll dive in and deliver it to you – but first let’s look at what’s happening with these newly approved vaccines and what they’re all about.
The FDA and CDC cleared variations of the two existing mRNA vaccines on the market – Moderna's and Pfizer’s for use for those 12 and older. Millions of doses of the new vaccines are being rolled out across the country this week – with the first newly formulated vaccines being available at some clinics as soon as today. So, what’s different with these vaccines? Who are they for? And to the point of your question, what’s the likelihood of there being good efficacy with these things? Here are the deets:
- The vaccines are part original COVID-19 vaccine & part newly formulated targeted against the BA.5 variant
- They’ve only been approved as “booster” doses for those 12 & older
- Human testing was completed with an original BA.1 variant vaccine dose early this year which proved largely effective in a study of 1400 people
At this point if you’re skeptical, I get it. There’s even less known about these reformulated “boosters” than there were with the original COVID-19 vaccines. I’ll elaborate on each of those three facts – because an explanation about what the heck is going on is probably needed. The base of these vaccines, roughly half, is what’s been on the market since December of 2020. Nothing new there. The other half is a new formulation which has been developed to attempt to combat what’s been the most dominant strain of Covid in recent months, the BA.5 variant. You might ask yourself why the base of the vaccine is targeting the original COVID-19 virus, when that’s not been a thing since late last spring (as in 2021). That’s probably a good question. And the likely answer would be that according to health authorities, while the original vaccines retain next to no efficacy at prevention against COVID-19, the CDC suggests, they still retain strong efficacy at the prevention of severe symptoms.
While most recently the original Moderna and Pfizer vaccines were shown to retain sub-5% efficacy at prevention, they still maintained approximately 76% efficacy in reducing severe symptoms. Using the original formulations as the base of these vaccines reduces the variables associated with the new formula. And then there’s the other half of these vaccines, the new variable which is designed to target the dominate strain of the virus right now. Starting last fall, with the onset of the Omicron-variant, the virus went through several rather rapid variations, which kept researchers chasing a moving target. The original intent of these newly formulated vaccines was to combat omicron’s BA.1 variant, hence why clinical human trials began this past winter. But then we blew through a few more strains before settling in on BA.5 as the dominant strain by late spring. As of the CDC’s most recent update in mid-August, 88.8% of all new COVID-19 cases in the US were BA.5 variants. With researchers having successfully completed human trials with BA.1, they tweaked the formulation to BA.5 which to-date has only been successfully tested on mice. This is why we don’t know what efficacy of prevention will be for these new vaccines. And even if we did there’s that other wildcard. What will the dominant strain of COVID-19 continue to be? And that takes me to a point I’d talked about long before the China virus was a thing. What’s happening here isn’t really new.
Triva time. When was the last year the annual fly vaccine had even 50% effectiveness in combating the flu? The survey says... 2013. Over the past decade the flu vaccine’s efficacy at prevention of the flu has only been 39%. Last year it was only 35%. The annual flu vaccine has always been little more than a guessing game and most commonly the virus variations have beaten the scientists in the guessing game. This really is no different. We’re just talking about a different, and more contagious seasonal flu virus. So, if history is a guide, that kind of efficacy, what we’ve historically seen with the seasonal flu vaccine, is the best guess behind what these might achieve. Perhaps the oddest and sketchiest decision of all was the decision to only allow these new vaccines as boosters – meaning in order to get the most current version of a vaccine you must first get the old one and wait.
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Today’s entry: Submitted via talkback regarding the efficacy of the newly approved COVID-19 vaccines.
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