Vaccine Development Editing and Proofreading Services

A vaccine is ninety-five per cent effective. Almost nobody who reads that sentence knows what it means, including people who write it. It does not mean that ninety-five per cent of vaccinated people are protected, and it does not describe your personal risk. It is a relative reduction between two arms of a trial, in a particular population, over a particular period, against a particular endpoint — and every one of those qualifiers has been dropped by the time the number reaches the public.

We edit what vaccine developers and public health teams produce — efficacy and effectiveness result descriptions, clinical trial reports and their summaries, regulatory submission summaries and briefing documents, safety and reactogenicity communications, product information and prescribing documents, public and patient-facing explanations of results, immunisation programme material for professionals, risk communication for rare adverse events, post-authorisation study reports and real-world effectiveness analyses, and scientific publications and conference material. Our editors work on the number that will be quoted without its conditions.

The efficacy claim is where vaccine communication most often misleads without intending to, and the fix is writing the qualifiers into the sentence rather than beneath it. We work through these so relative and absolute measures are given together, since a reduction from 2.0% to 0.1% is both a 95% relative reduction and a 1.9 percentage point absolute one, and the two produce different impressions of the same result; so the endpoint is stated in the same breath, because efficacy against symptomatic infection, against hospitalisation and against transmission are different numbers and are routinely conflated; so the population and the period are named, given that efficacy measured over two months in healthy adults says little about a year in the very elderly; so the confidence interval is given, particularly where events were few; so waning is addressed explicitly if any follow-up data exists, as this is the question the public actually has; and so any statement about protecting others is separated from protection of the recipient, because these rest on different evidence and conflating them has damaged trust repeatedly. Communication written this way survives the moment the number is quoted somewhere else.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including trial data, submissions and unpublished results. We are editors rather than immunologists, epidemiologists or public health advisers, and we offer no view on efficacy, safety or policy. What we can do is keep the conditions attached to the number.