Read on Twitter
If you see people citing the "one dose of the Pfizer vaccine is only 52% effective" claim, refer to this thread. The claim, like so many panicky claims this year, is based on poor understanding/ contextualisation of the statistical analysis it is plucked from. https://twitter.com/theosanderson/status/1344347380917940226
A more accurate figure for efficacy, from the same trials, and based on examining only the period after a full immune response has developed, is 86%.
As high profile journalists have also, once again, been citing this statistic without doing the 10 minutes or so of reading needed to understand what is wrong with it, I will reiterate my plea for compulsory statistics training for journalists.
It just really isn't good enough that after nine months of coverage of an issue which screams in 100 foot high flaming letters "you need to understand the complexities of this properly before reporting on it" so many in our media (and elsewhere) still keep doing exactly that.
Media COVID coverage illustrated
(I would also add that there have been many journalists covering this who have done absolutely sterling work throughout. It is just disappointing that too many of thier colleagues still get basic things wrong, even after all this time).
