The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus is a novel betacoronavirus that likely emerged late last year from an animal reservoir in China. There is little to no pre-existing immunity against it in the human population. The clinical picture for the disease it causes, coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), ranges from very mild to fatal. The virus is highly transmissible and has spread globally.
As of 20 March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) is reporting that it is tracking the development of forty-four SARS-CoV-2 candidate vaccines. Two of these candidates have entered phase one and the other forty-two remain in the pre-clinical stage. There is an urgent need to determine when the first of these candidates will have been found to have a high degree of efficacy and will have been administered to a significant number of people.
The WHO defines vaccine efficacy as follows:
Vaccine efficacy: % reduction in disease incidence in a vaccinated group compared to an unvaccinated group under optimal conditions
This question asks: When will 10M people be administered a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate that has demonstrated an efficacy rate >75% in a n>500 RCT?
This question resolves as the date when the first credible article is published that presents the claim that at least 10 million people have been administered a vaccine that had been previously shown to have an efficacy rate exceeding >75% in a randomized controlled trial with at least 500 participants.
If this does not resolve before 08 April 2023, it resolves as >08 April 2023.
The 10M people can receive different vaccines, as long as they all qualify by this question's criteria.
Being administered a vaccine means having followed the treatment course that was tested in the RCT. If the vaccine needs several shots, then only people who have received all of them count.
Edit on 2020-05-06: removed "outside a clinical trial" from the resolution language. Previous resolution language :
This question resolves as the date when the first credible article is published that presents the claim that at least 10,000 people outside a clinical trial have been administered a vaccine that had been previously shown to have an efficacy rate exceeding >95% in a randomized controlled trial with at least 500 participants.
Edit on 2020-11-21: Changed the title, question phrasing and added a caveat to allow several vaccines. Also added caveat about multi-shot vaccines.