The other side of the 95% efficacy story

 One side of the story has already gone viral.

Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna reported the relative risk reduction of their vaccines. 95.1%  and 94.1%, respectively.

but the manufacturers and the media haven't reported the other side of the story yet.

Maybe the media will soon. We'll see.

The other side is called absolute risk reduction.

So every relative risk reduction(RRR) has a corresponding absolute risk reduction(ARR), calculated with the same set of numbers. So they could have published the ARR numbers. But they seemingly didn't want to confuse the public with the numbers for absolut risk reduction. 

Because the ARR for both vaccines arrive at about 1%. Compare that 1% ARR with the 95% RRR. They chose not to publish, not to confuse.

 "Absolute risk reduction (ARR) and relative risk reduction (RRR) are measures of treatment efficacy reported in randomized clinical trials. Because the ARR and RRR can be dramatically different in the same trial, it is necessary to include both measures when reporting efficacy outcomes to avoid outcome reporting bias."¹ 

Ron E. Brown from the University of Waterloo in Ontario,Canada calculated the ARR for both mRNA vaccines,and, after peer-review, published his findings. Here is the link to that paper:

Outcome Reporting Bias in COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Clinical Trials

The paper also  gives a nice introduction to the concept of ARR and RRR:

ARR vs. RRR ¹

You can also watch an interview with Mr. Brown, talking about his paper here:  

 Dr. Ron Brown Discusses Outcome Reporting Bias in COVID-19 mRNA Clinical Trials |

Reference: 

1)Brown, Ronald B. 2021. "Outcome Reporting Bias in COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Clinical Trials" Medicina 57, no. 3: 199. https://doi.org/10.3390/medicina57030199