Professor Ed Lavelle, from Trinity College Dublin's School of Biochemistry and Immunology, is an expert on vaccines.
(Source: Flickr)Each week on "Simplified", Dave and Fionnuala aim to give clear explanations of different issues relating to the pandemic.
This week, they have looked at the development and usage of vaccines, with Professor Ed Lavelle, who works in this area, taking the time to answer some questions.
The first question asked was about efficacy. What does efficacy or an efficacy rate of a vaccine actually mean?
"The efficacy rates really derive from the clinical trials that were done. So, efficacy is basically the number of people that would develop symptomatic disease, either in the people that got the placebo or the people that got the vaccine, and you can compare those effects. They will generate those figures like 95% or 70% or 60%."
Professor Lavelle has also explained why it is important for as many people as possible to get the COVID-19 vaccine when they are offered it.
He says vaccines have been instrumental in dealing with many serious diseases in the past:
"One of my dad's sisters died as a kid of meningitis. Polio used to paralyze people until a couple of decades ago. Meningitis was a horrible killer until not that long ago. It wasn't like magically someone made these things disappear...The vaccines have protected people.
"There's nothing good about COVID. But reminding people that we always have to deal with infectious diseases is really important. We're always going to have to deal with infections and the most efficient way to deal with them is vaccination."
You can listen to everything Professor Lavelle had to say here:
