Decoding the Challenges of Data Literacy: Lessons from COVID-19 Vaccine Trials

Name Institutional Affiliations Date Covid-19 Vaccine Trials Are a Case Study on the Challenges of Data Literacy article. Langhe (2020) analyses Pfizer/BioNTech press release on covid-19 from three perspectives. Big data is often smaller than it appears, two on how precision can undermine the accuracy and finally on the need to distinguish between prediction and post-diction. Langhe argues that it is easy and very dangerous to misinterpret big data, especially when the report comes in percentages rather than figures through the lenses of big data are often smaller than it appears. Citing the example of the vaccine efficacy reported in Nov 2020, the author confirms that though the sample size involved over 43000 participants, the over 90% vaccine efficacy involved only the number of participants who got infected wit