Vaccine efficacy

Vaccine efficacy or vaccine effectiveness is the percentage reduction of disease cases in a vaccinated group of people compared to an unvaccinated group. For example, a vaccine efficacy or effectiveness of 80% indicates an 80% decrease in the number of disease cases among a group of vaccinated people compared to a group in which nobody was vaccinated. When a study is carried out using the most favorable, ideal or perfectly controlled conditions,^[1] such as those in a clinical trial, the term vaccine efficacy is used.^[2] On the other hand, when a study is carried out to show how well a vaccine works when they are used in a bigger, typical population under less-than-perfectly controlled conditions, the term vaccine effectiveness is used.^[1]^[2]

Vaccine efficacy was designed and calculated by Greenwood and Yule in 1915 for the cholera and typhoid vaccines. It is best measured using double-blind, randomized, clinical controlled trials, such that it is studied under "best case scenarios."^[3]

Vaccine efficacy studies are used to measure several important and critical outcomes of interest such as disease attack rates, hospitalizations due to the disease, deaths due to the disease, asymptomatic infection, serious adverse events due to vaccination, vaccine reactogenicity, and cost effectiveness of the vaccine. Vaccine efficacy is calculated on a set population (and therefore is not a constant value when counting in other populations), and may be misappropriated to be how efficacious a vaccine is in all populations.

^ ^a ^b Zimmer, Carl (20 November 2020). "2 Companies Say Their Vaccines Are 95% Effective. What Does That Mean? You might assume that 95 out of every 100 people vaccinated will be protected from Covid-19. But that's not how the math works". The New York Times. Retrieved 21 November 2020.
^ ^a ^b Principles of Epidemiology in Public Health Practice (3rd ed.), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2006, pp. 3–49
^ (Weinburg, G., & Szilagyi, P. (2010). Vaccine Epidemiology: Efficacy, Effectiveness, and the Translational Research Roadmap. Journal of Infectious Diseases, 201(11), 1607-1610.)

[NYT-20201120-1] Zimmer, Carl (20 November 2020). "2 Companies Say Their Vaccines Are 95% Effective. What Does That Mean? You might assume that 95 out of every 100 people vaccinated will be protected from Covid-19. But that's not how the math works". The New York Times. Retrieved 21 November 2020.

[CDC-2] Principles of Epidemiology in Public Health Practice (3rd ed.), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 2006, pp. 3–49

[wienburg-3] (Weinburg, G., & Szilagyi, P. (2010). Vaccine Epidemiology: Efficacy, Effectiveness, and the Translational Research Roadmap. Journal of Infectious Diseases, 201(11), 1607-1610.)

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