Lights and tunnels

Sometimes, your point of view really matters.

If you’re planning a barbecue and the weather report has changed to driving rain, you might be truly disappointed.

But if the wildfire index is high and a forest fire is bearing down on your neighbourhood, a change in the weather report to a lot of heavy rain might be just the thing you’re looking for.

That’s a bit of a facile example, but it makes the point — two different people can have wildly different interpretations about the exact same thing.

Now, stop and think about that from the point of view of COVID-19 vaccines, and the information that’s been pouring out about everything from manufacturing processes to the efficacy of different vaccines.

If you’ve been paying attention, you might have noticed articles talking about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine being 66 per cent effective against COVID-19, compared to the Novavax vaccine being 89 per cent effective.

From the comfort of your armchair, the choice there seems pretty clear and obvious: I want the more effective one.

But you might be missing something important. There’s so much information out there that we’re all virologists and epidemiologists now — except, we aren’t.

As the New York Times pointed out Monday morning, when vaccine specialists talk about the efficacy of vaccines, they’re talking about the ability of the vaccine to completely halt a virus in its tracks — so that, if people get the Johnson & Johnson shot, 66 per cent of them don’t get COVID-19. But what’s not regularly talked about is what happens with the people who get a vaccine, and then get COVID-19 anyway.

By and large, they get a milder case — even among some of the new variant strains.

Consider what doctors are saying about that, as quoted by the Times’ David Leonhardt on Monday.

“In terms of the severe outcomes, which is what we really care about, the news is fantastic,” said Dr. Aaron Richterman, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told Leonhardt: “I don’t actually care about infections. I care about hospitalizations and deaths and long-term complications.”

And, Leonhardt points out, the numbers back that up for all five of the current leading vaccine contenders: “All five of the vaccines — from Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Novavax and Johnson & Johnson — look extremely good. Of the roughly 75,000 people who have received one of the five in a research trial, not a single person has died from COVID, and only a few people appear to have been hospitalized. None have remained hospitalized 28 days after receiving a shot.”

The more complicated part, of course, is actually getting doses of the vaccines, and then getting them into arms.

But there’s light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel. We just have to keep doing our parts to get there.