601–610 of 712 posts
I'm in the trial. It's really exciting, not least because form a purely selfish point of view, I might be immune already! ...or not. But it's exciting either way! AMA?
How often are your follow-ups?
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Extrapolation. Is there a scientific rationale as to why the vaccine would NOT be safe and effective in a new population? If not, approve it for that population. If there is rationale why it wouldn’t be, ask for more data.
Why would the reasons used to exclude those cohorts in the first place not be used to determine the vaccine is unsafe for said cohorts?
Noise in the data - you want as clean a population as you can get. If you start including people with chronic conditions, as soon as someone in your trial dies you get to play a game called "prove that it wasn't the vaccine that killed them".
Same with people over 55 years old - they are known to respond differently to vaccines. The worst thing in the world would be showing a 49.4% reduction in Covid infection rate (the FDA wants 50% minimum) and then being forced to do a bunch of handwaving about how your results were skewed by the 55+ patients in your study and "by gosh, I swear it would be over 50% if we adjust for them using this methodology we just made up". Nobody will believe you and you'll be relegated to "that vaccine that almost works".
Ethics - Kids aren't (well, very rarely) dying from Covid, but they could die after getting your experimental vaccine. Kids sickened by experimental drugs makes for bad press, not only you, but also the FDA. Easier to just exclude them for now.
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> (like we have for literally every single fatal illness) Smallpox. And if you consider within the borders of a given country, a dozen others (polio, measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox).
None of those are a common type of Flu, which we've never been able to cure, though.
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If you tell people whether they're now vaccinated, they're going to take a lot more risks. You may still have increased risk taking behavior if you don't tell them whether they got the real vaccine or placebo, but it will be equally increased across the experiment and control groups.
It's rudimentary to figure out if you got a vaccine or placebo. Live vaccines tend to produce the type of temporary localized soreness you experience with a flue shot. Placebos do not. Really it's about measuring how likely vaccinated participants are to contracting the virus than those that received the placebo.
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If you tell people whether they're now vaccinated, they're going to take a lot more risks. You may still have increased risk taking behavior if you don't tell them whether they got the real vaccine or placebo, but it will be equally increased across the experiment and control groups.
It's rudimentary to figure out if you got a vaccine or placebo. Live vaccines tend to produce the type of temporary localized soreness you experience with a flue shot. Placebos do not. Really it's about measuring how likely vaccinated participants are to contracting the virus than those that received the placebo.
A real vaccine, with side effects that are similar to what is expected of the covid-19 vaccine. It is a well tested and safe vaccine and it will protect you from meningitis but not from covid-19.
They are doing that exactly for the reason you are mentioning. Of course, participants are aware of the nature of the placebo they might receive.
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Generally speaking, experimental drug trials are run first on healthy groups and then in at-risk groups (old, young, those with co-morbidities). From the article, my guess is that they are expediting the sensitive groups trials, but unfortunately there's a lack of technical detail. Source: My partner is an infectious disease specialist and we talk about this pretty much daily because I'm so curious.
But for this disease that's particularly bad because Covid has shown to be worst in 55+, obese, comorbidities, etc... which means that the trials on healthy groups are proving very little, since the virus itself is so much weaker on healthy groups.
This is only one of 11 vaccines now in phase III efficacy tests.[1] Six vaccines already have "partial approval", but those are the ones in Russia and China, which may or may not be working, and the governments decided to try anyway. All of those provoke an immune response. Whether it's enough of the right immune response is found out in phase III testing. Something is probably going to work. The big question is how…
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AstraZeneca is BigPharm! May not be as Merck or Pfizer, but they are on the big ones.
Yes, but it’s bizarre to complain about the deal while not knowing enough about it to even accurately remember which company was a signatory to it.
For example, Russians owns a bunch of funds in US mutual funds, and us big oil owns a lot stakes in Russian oils. So the whole idea that we are still living in the idea of nation state is over! Private company (like Federal reserve) has their own military.
Trump signed the moon mining order: https://www.space.com/trump-moon-mining-space-resources-exec...
We are pretty much back to West/East India Company ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company ) in the process of becoming a multi-planetary civilisation.
Most things are hidden behind attorney-client privilege and ran by a hand full of law-firms for the elite rich people. Someone who have managed billions dollars for the public and private sector has once said no body really know who owns the debt of the planet.
Personally I support more transparency let everything come out and let the people judge. There is the risk of anger of mop and chopping off some heads like the French did. Truth will set you free, at first if fucking piss you off. Hope everyone will exercise some constrains and respect the due process even for those who have done so much bad things.
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Even so, reducing the severity would be great. Even if a patient doesn't die, Covid-19 can have devastating and long-lasting effects. If a vaccine could reduce it to just a mild flu, I think that's good enough. You just have to inject everyone and probably add it to the standard child vaccination set.
Why would you vaccinate children for something which is less deadly than the flu? This is the case even up to 60 years old.
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That problem will solve itself then.
>That problem will solve itself then. At a considerable cost. There's a large number of people for whom the vaccine won't work when it has been taken correctly or who cannot take the vaccine because it will react very badly with their chemotherapy or whatever. This "let Darwin deal with the anti-vaxers" solution, though initially attractive, ends up being sociopathic when you dig into it.