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and the efficacy to be reported
to the scientific community and to the general public as
probability that a newly vaccinated person will shielded from Covid-19.
The uncertain values of are characterized by the pdf
, obtained in this work by MCMC, and
whose mean value has exactly the meaning of efficacy,
in analogy to Laplace's rule of succession to quantify the probability
of a future event.
We have stressed not only the importance of providing
the most complete information of
, whose graphical
representation provides better than many words its uncertainty,
but also that of summarizing the results (if only two numbers
have to be chosen) with mean and standard
deviation of the distribution. In fact, although
the probability distribution of is what is
really needed to the development of predictive what-if scenarios,
mean and standard deviation are the most useful quantities
to be used for further approximated evaluations.
With regards to the comparison with the published result, the efficacy
values obtained in this analysis as mean of the probability distribution
of are in good agreement with them
for the reasons just reminded in the previous section, with
the exception of the 100% claim that speaks for itself.
This agreement plays an important role in validating the causal
model on which the analysis is based,
indeed very simple (but not simplistic!), that
can be used by students and researchers to repeat the analysis -
for this reason pieces of programming code have also been provided.