So my mom found this article and was panicking - because it said the Pfizer vaccine “was 74.4% effective in Asian Americans” without any explanation or note.

This is /extremely misleading/ and it’s really irresponsible to publish something like this w/o explaining. (1/7) https://twitter.com/latimes/status/1339024551217405952
So if you read the FDA document on Pfizer, you’ll see that out of the 37,796 clinical trial participants, only 1763 were “Asian” - and 880 got the vaccine, while 883 got placebo (2/7)

https://www.fda.gov/media/144245/download
Why is this important? A placebo (a shot with no vaccine) is a control population that allows you to test the vaccine’s efficacy by looking at how many people get sick without the vaccine. (3/7)
So out of the 880 Asians who got vaccine, only 1 got sick.

Out of the 883 Asians who got placebo, 4 got sick.

This turns into “74.4% effective in Asian Americans.” Bc going from 4 —> 1 is about a 75% reduction
(slight diff due to some calc w other sub groups in testing)
(4/7)
The article also says the Pfizer vaccine was “100% effective in Native Americans and Pacific Islanders.”

There were only 83 participants from that group. 54 got vaccine and 29 got placebo. 0 got sick in vaccine group & 1 got sick in placebo. That’s “100%” efficacy!! (5/7)
So is anything in this article factually incorrect? No. It simply reported the percentages from the Pfizer study.

But is saying the vaccine is only 74.4% effective in Asians correct? No - the real answer is, we don’t really know. And why didn’t Pfizer test more Asians? (6/7)
They probably didn’t have time to be picky. Just wanted to get clinical trial participants ASAP.

But it’s the responsibility of science reporters to /explain/ these kinds of reports! Bc otherwise it can really undermine confidence in the vaccine. (END)
ADDENDUM:
I felt like I should be more clear -
Those are EXTREMELY small sample sizes, way too small to be meaningful & draw larger conclusions about vaccine efficacies in different races.

(In comparison, 33,006 test participants were white)
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