The paper I shared actually doesn't support the claim of preventing infection.
The trials showed a minimal risk of adverse responses to the injection itself and what appeared to be a reduced rate of symptoms. The trials didn't cover impact on infection rates at all, that would have required proactively testing every participant for infection which wasn't done. The trials only followed self reported symptoms, meaning all the study can indicate is a correlation with reduced symptomatic infection.
The paper linked shows a reduced rate of COVID in the pool of people that received a vaccine candidate compared to the pool that received a placebo:
A total of 43,548 participants underwent randomization, of whom 43,448 received injections:
21,720 with BNT162b2 and
21,728 with placebo.
There were 8 cases of Covid-19 with onset at least 7 days after the second dose among participants assigned to receive BNT162b2 and 162 cases among those assigned to placebo;
BNT162b2 was 95% effective in preventing Covid-19
Again, no vaccine ever really 100% prevents infection - what they do is reduce the number and severity of cases. Vaccines are literally created to increase the human bodies ability to fight off infection - efficacy varies by age and many other factors.
I think we are saying the same thing in slightly different ways.
Agreed, they found fewer cases of Covid, the disease not the infection, based on self report data from the two test populations. They did not test the entire population for CoV-2 infection, if they did a difference in 8 cases may not have been considered statistically significant depending on what they intended to show.
My claims here have nothing to do with whether vaccines prevent infection or that 100% is a realistic expectation. I'm simply pointing out that what was actually tested and reported in the trials can't be used to support claims of reducing infection or transmissibility. If that's what the OP paper here is doing I call BS.
