A side-by-side comparison of the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines: For now, the good news is that the United States has two Covid-19 vaccines that have been shown to be highly effective.
What follows is a head-to-head comparison of the ones developed by Pfizer and its partner, BioNTech, and by Moderna. Note that the chances of most individuals being able to “pick” one or the other are slim to none, especially in the initial rollout. The vaccine available is the one you’ll get.
The Tremendous Success of Operation Warp Speed: Why were only 300 million doses of a vaccine secured that had already demonstrated 95 percent efficacy in clinical trials at the time? One that had been hailed as a sensation and was already on its way to regulatory approval? German Health Minister Spahn pushed for more to be purchased, but he failed to prevail in the end due to opposition from several EU member countries — in part, apparently, because the EU had ordered only 300 million doses from the French company Sanofi. “That’s why buying more from a German company wasn’t in the cards,” says one insider familiar with the negotiations. The European Commission has denied that version of events, saying it isn’t true that Paris took massive steps to protect Sanofi. ...
I am annoyed at Fauci for the second time, this time for dissing the AZ vaccine:
But even if the vaccine ends up being approved, it will probably only have an efficacy of 60 to 70 percent. “What are you going to do with the 70 percent when you’ve got two (vaccines) that are 95 percent? Who are you going to give a vaccine like that to?” Anthony Fauci, the leading American expert on vaccines, recently wondered.
This attitude is counter-productive. As I wrote earlier:
In the big picture, the efficacious of a vaccine doesn’t matter per se what matters is getting to herd immunity. If you have a less efficacious vaccine you need to vaccinate more people but herd immunity is herd immunity, i.e. vaccines mostly protect people not because they are efficacious but because we reach herd immunity.
