Tuesday, January 19, 2021

Real World Evidence and the covid-19 vaccine

This is Joseph

Israel is currently the world leader in giving vaccines for covid-19 with > 2 million first doses and only 400,000 second doses. They are also in the midst of a surge of cases, among those with a single shot. Now some of this can be attributed to people taking risks before the vaccine has time to kick in and build antibodies. But it shows the challenges of estimating the actual outcome of policies like "First Doses First" without trial evidence. 

Now this approach may yet be vindicated -- it is too early in the Israeli experiment to draw firm conclusions and the popular press account lacks a great deal of information other than that the country is setting case records. We may find out that things end up better than it currently looks once the analysis allows tighter sequencing between vaccine timeline and incident infections. 

But I think that this just emphasizes how important it is to get a wide rollout of the full vaccine protocol in the most expedient manner possible. 

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