Indeed that is what I meant. Thanks for trying to understand even if I wasn't perfectly clear in my wording.
Indeed, maximum efficiency is achieved after 12 days in Pfizer data (and similarly in the Israeli data). That's the reason some countries consider giving just one - they suspect it won't be as-long-lasting without the booster, but that's from prior experience, not anything specific for this vaccine.
I'm incredibly frustrated at the amount of people parroting "yes, two weeks after the first vaccine it's 50%, two weeks after the 2nd it's 95%". Yes, that's what Pfizer said, and I think I managed to reproduce their calculation - and if I did, it is intentionally misleading.
It seems a lot of people are religiously believing the headlines without looking at the publicly available data. I thank you for looking at it.
Original comment:
I don't know where you're getting this, but the Pfizer paper [0] clearly shows that disease prevalence is much lower after the second dose:
> Among participants with and those without evidence of prior SARS CoV-2 infection, 9 cases of Covid-19 at least 7 days after the second dose were observed among vaccine recipients and 169 among placebo recipients, corresponding to 94.6% vaccine efficacy (95% CI, 89.9 to 97.3).
> Between the first dose and the second dose, 39 cases in the BNT162b2 group and 82 cases in the placebo group were observed, resulting in a vaccine efficacy of 52% (95% CI, 29.5 to 68.4) during this interval and indicating early protection by the vaccine, starting as soon as 12 days after the first dose.
You are right about the severe cases though - they had 1 in the vaccine group and 4 in the placebo group, which is far too little data to draw any meaningful conclusions from (it's also worth noting that the single severe case in the vaccinated group occurred >7 days after the second dose, so there is absolutely no data to draw conclusions on severe disease impact with a single dose).
[0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577 [1] https://www.nejm.org/na101/home/literatum/publisher/mms/jour...