I wish it was that effective, but you can't compare the data that way. You're basically comparing the vaccine rate to covid spread rate - by the vaccine being distributed faster will tilt the numbers towards the vaccine looking more effective and vice versa. There's tons of variables you're not accounting for. It's why studies have specific protocols and control groups.
How CDC Measures COVID-19 Vaccine Effectiveness
I started reading that CDC page and found some studies that do support your general conclusion that the effectiveness against hospitalization is extremely high, but no where near your calculated number. I could only find 14-day hospitalizations and not total hospitalizations though. Found the studies at this link from CDC:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/effectiveness.html#Research1
First study summary (emphasis mine):
Note that the bold appears to be for all symptoms and not just hospitalizations and deaths like we're discussing.
Reference 3 in that study is "observational studies of the mRNA vaccine effectiveness against severe COVID-19" titled "
FDA-authorized COVID-19 vaccines are effective per real-world evidence synthesized across a multi-state health system". Here's the abstract from that study (emphasis mine):
So the data shows that the 14-day hospitalization rate for that study was (1-0.887)*.037=0.0042=0.4%, which is orders of magnitude bigger than the number you're calculating (.0000061% is 65,000 times smaller than 0.4%). However, that is extremely low, which is very good news. I assume total hospitalizations will be higher since there's going to be some number of hospitalizations less than 14 days.
There's another study about real-world effectiveness in two nursing homes experiencing an outbreak (vaccine effectiveness 63%); it's interesting but not germane to our discussion:
Effectiveness of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine Among Residents of Two Skilled Nursing Facilities Experiencing COVID-19 Outbreaks — Connecticut, December 2020–February 2021
You are not looking at the correct data points. CDC, WHO, Fauci, immunologists, virologists all disagree with you.
from your link. Bold mine.
In a phase 3 trial studying BNT162b2 (
9), the COVID-19 vaccine candidate developed by Pfizer/BioNTech, 50 out of 21,314 (0.23%) vaccinated patients experienced a symptomatic COVID-19 infection, with an incidence rate of 12.5 cases per 1000 person-years. In contrast, 275 of 21,258 (1.29%) patients receiving a placebo injection developed COVID-19, with an incidence rate of 69.1 cases per 1000 person-years.
Thirty patients experienced severe disease, all of whom had received placebo. Seven or more days after the second dose, the difference between groups was even more pronounced, with incidence rates of 3.61 and 72.9 cases per 1000 person-years in the vaccinated and placebo groups, respectively (efficacy = 95.0%; 95% CI: 90.3-97.6%).
Similarly, in the trial studying mRNA-1273 (
10), the vaccine candidate developed by Moderna, 19 of 14,550 (0.13%) vaccinated patients experienced a symptomatic infection compared to 269 of 14,598 (1.84%) patients receiving placebo.
Among these symptomatic infections, there were 9 cases of severe COVID-19 in the placebo group compared to only one in the vaccinated cohort. This effect was stronger when considering infection rates 14 or more days after the second dose, with incidence rates of 3.3 and 56.5 cases per 1000 person-years in the vaccinated and placebo groups, respectively (efficacy = 94.1%; 95% CI: 89.3-96.8%).
on the open label study you reference...Less than 1% even tested positive for Covid-19.
Over the duration of our study (see
Methods), 263 of 31,069 (0.85%) vaccinated individuals tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 compared to 661 of 31,069 (2.13%) matched unvaccinated individuals
I
mportantly, we found that two of the six infections in the vaccinated cohort on or after day 36 occurred in individuals who had received only one vaccine dose, even though all vaccinated individuals should have received two doses by this time point per the manufacturer guidelines
There are several important limitations to consider in this study. First, while the cohort size was even larger than the cohorts studied in phase 3 trials, the mean follow-up time per patient is substantially lower (mean = 27.1 days versus approximately 80 to 90 days).
Consistent with this, approximately 45.1% of our vaccinated cohort had received only one dose of vaccination at the time of this study
Now we need to find out from the open label trial you referenced is the number of fully vaccinated individuals who were hospitalized.
