05-30-2021, 09:12 PM
(05-30-2021, 05:50 PM)plam Wrote:(05-30-2021, 05:23 PM)tomh009 Wrote: The early estimates is that the vaccine effectiveness is down only by about 10% (for BioNTech-Pfizer and AZ, presumably others will be similar) so at the moment it does not appear dramatically worse.
Not-yet-peer-reviewed article here:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/...21257658v1
The issue is that single dose effectiveness against B16172 is much lower than against B117. Is a problem given that most Canadians have only one dose.
Yes, the early estimate has it at a 35% reduction in efficacy -- but it still has more than 33% efficacy. The second doses are now starting, and more than 97% of the variants in detected in Ontario are still the British one (B.1.1.7), not the South African or Brazilian one. So, I think it's quite possible that this one, too, will spread slowly enough for the second-dose vaccinations to have an impact in time.
No one actually knows this, though, everyone is either projecting (based on data) or guessing. I'm not going to panic quite yet.