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Each week on “Simplified”, Dave and Fionnuala aim to give clear explanations of different issues relating to the pandemic.
This week, they have looked at the development and usage of vaccines, with Professor Ed Lavelle, who works in this area, taking the time to answer some questions.
The first question asked was about efficacy. What does efficacy or an efficacy rate of a vaccine actually mean?
“The efficacy rates really derive from the clinical trials that were done. So, efficacy is basically the number of people that would develop symptomatic disease, either in the people that got the placebo or the people that got the vaccine, and you can compare those effects. They will generate those figures like 95% or 70% or 60%.”
“I don’t think this means that Ireland is under pressure to reverse their decision, I think they’ll consider what they’re saying, but Ireland has access to three vaccines at the moment so we can consider who gets what,” Prof Lavelle told Morning Ireland.
“What they did was they looked at the immune responses [to the AstraZeneca vaccine], so they looked at the T cell and B cell responses in that trial across all age sectors and found that they were comparable in under 65s and over 65s. It’s not certainty, but in their minds it was predictive that it would be effective in over 65s.