A COVID-19 Vaccine May Be Only 50% Effective. Is That Good Enough?
Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief of the National Institute of Health and Infectious Disease, has tried to set realistic expectations when discussing the importance of a vaccine. “We don’t know yet what the efficacy might be.
We don’t know if it will be 50% or 60%,” Fauci said during a Brown University event in August. So what does 50% efficacy mean?“When we talk ‘vaccine effectiveness,’ what we’re talking about is, ‘How effective was the vaccine at preventing actual disease?’ “In other words, Tan says, “If you vaccinate 100 people, 50 people will not get disease.”