LEST they be forgotten and their deaths will be in vain: today marks the commemoration of the sixth death anniversary of the “SAF 44” in recognition of their heroism and gallantry in the service of God, country and people.
On Jan. 25, 2015, 44 members of the Philippine National Police’s Special Action Forces perished as they encountered rebels and private armed groups in Mamasapano, Maguindanao.
These fallen SAF 44 were sent to their massacre and abandoned by that cowardly nincompoop, then President Noynoy Aquino.
There. I said it. And we segue to something more current affecting us.
The debate between the efficacy and effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines is still on and everyone on social media has suddenly become epidemiologists and virologists, not to mention experts on immunizations and vaccines, with their posts and arguments on which vaccine is effective versus its efficacy.
But do they really know the difference between efficacy and effectiveness or similarities? Do they really know what these two high-sounding words mean aside from their spirited discussions bordering on racism, political leanings and stupidity, and the fact that they’re just fans of a certain Jose Marie Viceral a.k.a. “Vice Ganda”?
In the meantime, let’s have a bit of foreplay before we go the topic at hand.
“JOE BIDEN is not my president”, I posted on social media a few days ago. You’d be surprised at the reaction I got. A lot of people were triggered and accused Moi of being a supporter of President Donald Trump. They never got the joke!
I just stated a fact I am a Filipino, therefore my president is whoever is sitting in Malacañang and currently, he happens to be Rodrigo Duterte.
By the way, the reactions of the so-called Eskolar ng Bayan to the termination of the accord between the University of the Philippines (UP) and the Department of National Defense (DND) are at best pedestrian, almost childish tantrums. They keep on harping on “academic freedom” when the termination of that accord has nothing to do with it.
During the brouhaha on the Anti-Terror Law, these same people were the ones saying that the law says an activist is a terrorist when not a single word said anything to that effect in the law.
These are also the same people who were shouting that Ferdinand Marcos was not a hero and therefore should not have been buried in the Libingan ng mga Bayani. He was buried in that cemetery not because he was a hero, and he never was, but because he was a former president as provided for by law.
Which makes us wonder about these so called Eskolar ng Bayan and their “critical thinking” nonsense; they’re still shouting the same obsolete slogans and failed ideologies, so typically naïve impressionable fools.
And we go to the topic at hand…excerpts from a Nov. 18, 2020 article on www.gavi.org What’s the Difference between Efficacy and Effectiveness?
Efficacy is the degree to which a vaccine prevents disease, and possibly also transmission, under ideal and controlled circumstances – comparing a vaccinated group with a placebo group. Effectiveness meanwhile refers to how well it performs in the real world. Although a vaccine that has high efficacy – such as Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine with 94.5% efficacy and Pfizer’s with 90% efficacy – would be expected to be highly effective in the real world, it is unlikely to translate into the same effectiveness in practice.
A vaccine with an efficacy of 90% in a trial, for instance, means there was a 90% reduction in cases of disease in the vaccinated group compared to the unvaccinated (or placebo) group. But efficacy in laboratory conditions does not always translate to effectiveness, and so an efficacy trial can overestimate a vaccine’s impact in practice.
In clinical trials, the conditions under which a participant is taking a vaccine are carefully designed – people are often not included in trials if they have underlying health issues, or are taking medication – and side effects are closely monitored.
Moreover, participants in the trial represent a subsection of the full age range of a population. For example, not many COVID-19 vaccine trials have included young children, even though they may also need to receive the vaccine when one is ready.
When a vaccine is given to the population, factors, such as the medication people are taking, underlying chronic illnesses, age, and how the vaccine is stored and administered under everyday conditions, can reduce how effective the vaccine is at preventing disease.
Once the efficacy of a vaccine has been determined, measuring its effectiveness is critical to ensuring uptake of the vaccine and to understand how to develop better vaccines. Surveillance data is vital to understanding effectiveness, as is immunization data – capturing data, for example, on when people get the vaccine and what proportion of the population in a given country is covered.
Effectiveness of a vaccine is measured in what epidemiologists call observational studies because participants are not randomly assigned to a treatment versus a placebo group. For example, case-control studies assess effectiveness by comparing the vaccination status of individuals who develop the disease (cases) with a group of individuals without the disease (controls) who are also representative of the population from which the cases arise. If the vaccine is effective, the cases are more likely to be the unvaccinated individuals.
Vaccines do not always need to have an exceptionally high effectiveness to be useful, for example the influenza vaccine is 40-60% effective yet saves thousands of lives every year.
There you go. I hope that enlightens our resident experts on social media./PN
