Dexamethasone is an approved drug recommended by the FDA for treatment of Covid and it didn’t stop the vaccine EUA. The vaccines are 95-100% effective in trials, no other drug comes close.

Please do not spread fake news. All current vaccines are less than 1% effective. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanmic/article/PIIS2666-5...

For anyone reading the above comment:

* The quoted 95% etc. numbers are in terms of Relative Risk (ie, the ratio of attack rates with and without a vaccine—which is expressed as 1–RR) * These numbers are essentially a reported efficacy and useless to compare between studies held under different conditions.

With this in mind, from the lancet article linked above:

> However, RRR should be seen against the background risk of being infected and becoming ill with COVID-19, which varies between populations and over time. Although the RRR considers only participants who could benefit from the vaccine, the absolute risk reduction (ARR), which is the difference between attack rates with and without a vaccine, considers the whole population.

>__ARRs tend to be ignored because they give a much less impressive effect size than RRRs: 1.3% for the AstraZeneca–Oxford, 1.2% for the Moderna–NIH, 1.2% for the J&J, 0.93% for the Gamaleya, and 0.84% for the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccines.__

“ ARRs tend to be ignored because they give a much less impressive effect size than RRR”

This is an odd statement. Why would that be the reason to ignore it? ARR is extremely specific to a time frame and location.

Without wide deployment of vaccines, almost everyone would eventually naturally catch the coronavirus at some point in the next several years. As vaccines are deployed, the risk reduces since vaccines reduce the R0 of the virus in that population. Any calculation of ARR would be highly speculative and have to include models about how widely the vaccine would be deployed, the transmissibility and mutation of the virus, and the RRR of the vaccine itself, as well as being stated only for a specific timeframe and location.

Given all this it’s obvious why RRR is the typically reported number and the one that makes sense to use in discussions.

As your article notes “ Vaccine efficacy is generally reported as a relative risk reduction (RRR).”

There is nothing fake about what I said. It’s simply the common sense way to think about the effectiveness of a vaccine.

According to your reasoning the polio and smallpox vaccines are 0% effective because those viruses have been eradicated in the USA currently.

That would depend on the efficacy of the existing possible treatment. Ivermectin is 70%, so it's not as effective as a vaccine. But it's a hell of lot better than nothing.

You have reversed the logical sequence.

You can't know how efficient a vaccine is without a trial. You need an authorization first to do that. But you wouldn't get an authorization if something exists, even "only" 70% better, because that 70% would make Covid less lethal than the yearly flu.

Hence 70% is enough to block emergency vaccines trial authorization.

Doctors often combine multiple drugs/treatments. Not every single part of the combination needs to be as good as a vaccine.