COVID-19 vaccines' efficacy rates not to be a criteria to delay vaccination, says experts

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Ottawa/Canadian-Media: Canadians have been advised not to consider efficacy rates of COVID-19 vaccines in to delay vaccination to prevent the lengthening the time it takes to get the pandemic under control, said Dr. Peter Liu, scientific director of Ontario's COVID-19 Science Advisory Table today.

Covid19 Vaccine. Image credit: Pixaby

"If people start to do that, they actually prevent Canadians from moving slowly back to normal," he said and added that long-term care homes are the only settings where it makes sense to use the highest efficacy vaccines, as residents are at extreme risk.

For most people, "there is no such thing as a bad vaccine," he said

Efficacy rates determined by Health Canada for both Pfizer-BioNtech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines to be around 95 percent, AstraZeneca-Oxford's vaccine efficacy rate of 62 percent, and Johnson & Johnson's efficacy rate of 66.9 percent.

But Liu told the Canadian Press that out of thousands of participants in trials for the vaccines, not a single person who received a shot died or was hospitalized from COVID-19, CBCNews reported.