Which Covid Vaccine Should You Get? Experts Weigh the Effect Against Severe Disease

But Dr. Fauci said that the more crucial measure was the ability to prevent severe disease, which translates to keeping people out of the hospital and preventing deaths. And that result, for Johnson Johnson, was 85 percent in all of the countries where it was tested, including South Africa, where a rapidly spreading variant of the virus had shown some ability to elude vaccines.

More important than preventing “some aches and a sore throat,” Dr. Fauci said, is to fend off severe disease, especially in people with underlying conditions and in older adults, who are more likely to become seriously ill and to die from Covid-19.

“If you can prevent severe disease in a high percentage of individuals, that will alleviate so much of the stress in human suffering and death in this epidemic that we’re seeing, particularly now,” Dr. Fauci said, “as we well know, over the last several weeks, our health care system has been stressed by the number of people that require hospitalization, as well as intensive care.”

Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, compared the ability to prevent severe disease to the effects of flu shots, which do not always prevent influenza entirely but can make it less severe.

“The same thing seems to be applying here, in a circumstance where this variant is clearly making it a little tougher to get the most vigorous response that you would want to have,” Dr. Collins said. “But still, for severe disease, it’s looking really good.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/health/Covid-vaccine-explainer.html