There are multiple coronavirus vaccines available. Is any one of them better?

[marmar]

(Salon) Assuming that the paperwork all goes as planned, the United States will likely have three novel coronavirus vaccines available by late spring: the Moderna vaccine, the Pfizer vaccine, and the forthcoming Oxford University/AstraZeneca vaccine, which is already being distributed in the United Kingdom and will soon face regulatory scrutiny here.

Many Americans don't have a choice as to which vaccine they get: their health care provider issues whatever they have on hand. Yet as time goes on and scarcity diminishes, some of us might actually be faced with a choice. That raises a curious question: With so many vaccines available to the public, which one should patients opt for if they do have the choice?

Notably, there are even more than three vaccines for SARS-CoV-2 available if you include the rest of the world. According to the Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society, an international organization for individuals involved in the regulation of healthcare and related products, there are nine vaccines that had been authorized and/or approved in at least some countries as of the end of January: the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, the Moderna vaccine, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, two Russian vaccines (Sputnik V and EpiVacCorona), three Chinese vaccines (by Wuhan Institute of Biological Products/Sinopharm, Beijing Institute of Biological Products/Sinopharm and Sinovac) and one from India (Bharat Biotech, ICMR). Another 58 vaccine candidates were listed as being in various stages of development.

....(snip)....

Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association (APHA) and former secretary of health in Maryland, expressed a similar point. He wrote to Salon that all of the vaccines are "highly safe and highly effective" and that if people are in a position to choose between different options, "you need to decide which characteristics you care about since there are subtle trade-offs," such as whether a given vaccine only requires one shot or two. He added that there are "no substantive differences in side effects, no differences in protection for severe disease or death, differences in preventing transmission is still unknown and the differences between overall effectiveness are minor." ...........(more)

https://www.salon.com/2021/02/06/there-are-multiple-coronavirus-vaccines-available-is-any-one-of-them-better/

[gibraltar72]

1. According to Dr. Fauci. The one you can get!