(English follows Japanese)
私たちの最初のアジアオフィスであるPHASTARの日本オフィスはこの度6ヶ月の「記念日」を過ぎました。このオフィスはPHASTARの戦略的なオペレーションの中核として機能するように設立され、オーストラリアのオフィスを補完してアジア太平洋地域のスポンサーをさらにサポートすると同時に会社の5カ年計画の重要な要素です。これまでのところエキサイティングで忙しいものでした。COVID-19はもちろん私たちの働き方やスポンサーとのコミニュケーションに変化が見られました。
PHASTAR's Head of Statistical Research and Consultancy chaired the judging panel for the Royal Statistical Society Statistics of the Year. Here, she goes through the winners and the runners up, highlighting the statistics that sum up 2020.
It’s three from three as far as positive outcomes from COVID vaccine trials are concerned but Monday’s announcement from AstraZeneca and Oxford University, at a first glance, may not seem to be as exciting as those from Pfizer and BioNTech, and Moderna. Furthermore, the figures are a bit of a head scratcher, so let’s look at them in more detail.
COVID-19 vaccine announcements are now coming at us thick and fast! Today Pfizer and BioNTech have announced the results of their final analysis on 170 COVID-19 cases, and this time they have provided us with more details.
We know that of the 170 COVID-19 cases in total, 162 were observed in the placebo group versus 8 in the vaccine group, giving a vaccine effectiveness (VE) of 95.1%. It is also reported that the analysis was carried out on at least 43,000 participants, meaning that the 95% confidence interval (CI) for this VE figured is estimated to be around 90% to 98% and a 99% CI would be 88% to 98%. Similar to the Moderna study (results discussed here), success at the final analysis was defined as a posterior probability that the VE was greater than 30% being greater than 98.6% (P(VE>30%|data) > 0.986), and the associated efficacy boundary for success was 52.3%. We can see that today’s reported VE of 95.1% is very far away from 52.3%, meaning that the trial has overwhelming evidence of efficacy.
Another Monday, another COVID-19 vaccine trial delivering some positive news. This week it is Moderna who have announced the results from their first interim analysis, and the numbers are just as impressive as those released by Pfizer and BioNTech last week and discussed here. We also have some actual numbers to take a look at in the Moderna press release, so let’s dive right in…