Don’t worry too much about efficacy rates, says Blondeau

An expert in infectious diseases says people should not be distracted by efficacy rates when reading headlines about COVID-19 vaccines.

Dr. Joseph Blondeau, a microbiologist at Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon, said the numbers should not overshadow the fact that each of the vaccines approved by Health Canada offers full protection against severe disease and death.

“That is the marker that you want,” Blondeau told Gormley on Monday morning.

Blondeau said vaccines cannot be compared against each other because their clinical trials were all structured differently, with different test populations and “endpoints.”

To compare vaccines against each other would require head-to-head trials.

Take the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine with its efficacy rate above 90 per cent. Blondeau said in those trials, people who received the vaccine received a negative PCR test.

The AstraZeneca and Johnson and Johnson trials “were more focused on the endpoints of moderate to severe disease including hospitalization and death.”

Preventing those severe cases, Blondeau said, should be the goal.

“In the grand scheme of things … if a person catches the virus and has sniffles and a little bit of a cold and it goes away in a few days, I don’t think anybody cares about that,” he said.

“If the vaccine is preventing the patients from getting more severe disease and hospitalization and … death, then that’s exactly what you want to be doing.”

When it comes time for his turn, and the vaccine offered is by AstraZeneca, Blondeau plans to accept it.

“I’m rolling up my sleeve regardless of which vaccine I’m being offered because they’re pretty much all the same,” he said.