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Scott GanzScott Ganz, assistant professor in the School of Public Policy, co-authored the article "What Statistics Tells Us About the Efficacy of the Pfizer, Moderna, & Oxford Vaccines," published Nov. 30, 2020 in RealClearPolicy.
In the article, Ganz and his co-author, James C. Capretta of the American Enterprise Institute, discuss the statistical science that led to Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna declaring the high efficacy rates of their Covid-19 vaccines.
Excerpt:
A reasonable question for those trying to understand the implications of the trial, however, is whether this impressive result could have occurred by chance, given that the sample size of 170 cases is relatively small. One way to gauge the robustness of the finding is to calculate the range of likely true efficacy rates — i.e., the efficacy rate of the vaccine when given to millions or billions of people — based on the results of the Phase 3 trial.
Here, there is more good news. Statistical modeling of vaccine efficacy in phase 3 trials reveals that, based on the Pfizer-BioNTech test, there is around a 99 in 100 chance that the true vaccine efficacy rate for this vaccine is above 90 percent. In short, in addition to having a high reported efficacy rate from the trial, the results should make us confident that the vaccine will be very effective when widely distributed.
