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Jayne Doe's avatar

Lockstep in no longer publishing reports world wide. More neferious medical malfecence, imo.

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Carol GB's avatar

Very interesting article on the uniformity of secondary attack rates over time - thank you.

Can you comment on the estimate of the PRIMARY attack rate which formed the basis for the Covid vaccine trial protocols? We were meant to be in a pandemic but the trial protocols assumed a 1% primary attack rate (AZ trial assumed an even lower rate of 0.8%) . On this basis, the protocols stated that a statistically significant vaccine efficacy could be identified after around 150 “cases” of Covid were identified and it seems that it took around 2-3 months to accumulate this number of cases in trials of up to ~35,000 participants. AZ protocol stated trials would be conducted in participants “at increased risk of infection due to their locations or circumstances” yet it took 3 months to accumulate 131 Covid cases in >11,000 people.

I’m not an epidemiologist but these numbers look extremely low. Is there an expected Primary Attack Rate in a supposedly immune naive population during a viral pandemic?

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