FDA says Dec 17 meeting to discuss. This contradicts some earlier opinions that the reason the FDA was taking so long to review Pfizer (Dec 10 scheduled date) was that they were planning to review 2-3 candidates together. For context, scheduling the meeting to review the candidates is running at 5-10% of the development time for these vaccines. 20M vaccines represent about 1/3 the elderly population in the US, there…
Officials have been going on about how this is the fastest vaccine ever produced and distributed. Then they backpedal slightly on that when the populace verbalizes legitimate concern that it was too fast to guarantee safety. Meanwhile, people like myself (and I assume you) are on the opposite side; this was too slow . This virus could have been much, much worse. Not to be insensitive, we (as a species) got off easy w…
There was talk early on about doing "challenge trials", where'd they vaccine a sub-group and the purposely infect them with the virus. There are huge ethical issues with this, especially for a virus with which we don't clearly know if someone will range from asymptotic to death. We certainly have statistics on likelihood, but there have been many reports of perfectly healthy, young, people dying from the disease. Given that unknown, I don't think it's possible for anyone to give informed consent for this kind of trial.