Good news on the vaccine front continues, with the AstraZeneca vaccine also reporting positive results regarding its clinical trials. The “Oxford vaccine” is also reportedly less expensive and easier to transport than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
Promising clinical trial results are a key milestone on the path to widespread distribution of a vaccine. Regulatory reviews are another, and Pfizer filed its Emergency Use Authorization application with the US Food & Drug Administration last week, moving that vaccine closer to actual distribution. But we’re not out of the woods yet. This week, we update our deep dive into the Superforecasters’ latest views on the timing of widespread vaccine availability with an update on a special forecast that Good Judgment made for The Economist’s World in 2021 edition.
We update our probability forecasts at 7am EST daily, refresh commentary weekly, and launch new questions often.
Good Judgment launched its first version of this question on April 17th, before Operation Warp Speed was publicly unveiled and at a point where the scope and trajectory of the COVID pandemic was highly uncertain. Our initial question asked “When will enough doses of FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine(s) to inoculate 25 million people be distributed in the United States?” and included answer options covering roughly six-month time windows out to April 2022, with a final option of “not before 1 April 2022.”
As more data became available about the vaccines under development, we realized that the Superforecasters could provide more precise forecasts about the probable timing of having enough doses to inoculate 25 million Americans. Therefore, on September 18th, we launched a revised version of our original question, asking the Superforecasters to look at five different time frames. These narrower and earlier time frames reflected increased optimism that the FDA would approve one or more vaccines before the end of 2020.
The framing of “Version 2” allows easy comparisons with our original vaccine question. Goldman Sachs analysts have created a combined graphic that displays the entire time series.
On October 9th, we launched a third version of our vaccine forecast question, at the request of Vijay Vaitheeswaran, US Business Editor at The Economist. This version expands the scope to ask “When will enough doses of FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccine(s) to inoculate 200 million people be distributed in the United States?”
The graph displayed here appeared in the online version of The Economist‘s story, which was released on November 16th. Due to publication schedules, though, the forecasts reflect what the Superforecasters were saying as of October 15th, before any of the clinical trial results were released.
The picture a month later is much clearer. And the outlook for having sufficient vaccine doses distributed to inoculate 200 million people in the US before the end of 2021 is far brighter. Here are the updated forecasts as of November 23rd:
It’s tempting to leap from the recent promising clinical trial results to confidence about the widespread availability of safe, effective COVID vaccines. But Katherine O’Brien, director of the World Health Organization’s immunization department, reportedly likened discovering a vaccine to building a base camp on Mount Everest, warning that “the climb to the peak is really about delivering the vaccines.”
Multiple uncertainties remain. So the Superforecasters will continue their in-depth examination of all public information, from press releases to journal preprints, to give you a comprehensive, up-to-the-minute overview of when to expect a COVID vaccine to be widely available.
Reading superforecasters gives a much better overview of the aggregate evidence. News gives you snapshots of single pieces of evidence, sensationalised to generate clicks.
Dr. Stefan Schubert, Oxford researcherHow accurate are the Superforecasters? Review the scores for all closed questions on our public scoreboard.
As of November 18th, ten of the questions on our Public Dashboard have resolved. The average Brier score for our aggregate Superforecasts over the ten questions is 0.30 on a 0 to 2 scale, where 0 represents perfect prescience.
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