Wasn’t happy with the negative press this excellent vaccine received at the start of the year. It wasn’t warranted, obviously overblown and now seems to be neck and neck with the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in terms of efficacy.https://t.co/ZTYI7qPVXS https://t.co/mlSxujSWIV pic.twitter.com/fShCP8fcTR

— Andrew L. Croxford (@andrew_croxford) March 6, 2021

When I got my jab at the end of January I was a little bit disappointed that it was the AstraZeneca and not the Pfizer one – after all the test results indicated that the latter was substantially better.

Under the system that is going on in England you really have no choice as to which of the vaccines you get. It is possible to go to a particular vaccinations centre in the hope that you might be offered what was perceived to be better but you couldn’t be certain.

The bad-mouthing of AstraZeneca was reinforced by the reports of German centres only the week before last where upto 80% of the available AZC jabs were unused. We then had Angela Merkel and President Macron making their less than helpful statements and this all reinforced the perception that AstraZeneca was somehow second-rate.

Until the data in the Tweet above came out those like me could take comfort by the fact there was some protection but still there was the lingering doubt.

Well all of that has changed and if you look at the charts we got the best one.

The big lesson from this is that results from trials of maybe tens of thousands of people are nothing like as significant as real world data based on millions.