> The major difference was that several of the steps went in parallel instead of sequence because there was the money, people, and will to do it.
That not true.
Important steps were skipped or shortened.
For example, blinding was broken a relatively short time after the beginning of the trial. Participant were notified whether they were part of the trial group or placebo group.
This makes the trial useless for the possibility of long term side effects.
Edit: note that the NPR piece missed the more important problem. While some people in the placebo group decided to continue the study and not to take the vaccine, blinding was irrecoverably broken, and what is worse, they are self selected, so randomization is gone as well.
That link says that after the FDA authorized the shots, the study participants were offered them. Not that something was skipped _before_ authorization.
Not giving these people the shots would have been immoral, it was already clear that they were effective and safe.
>Not giving these people the shots would have been immoral, it was already clear that they were effective and safe.
It was not clear that they were long-term safe; there was not enough long-term data yet to discover this. And by unblinding, they made it very hard to gather such data.
Now that we have some such data, we see that indeed there are some non-trivial long term risks, such as doubling the risk of blood clotting in the eyes: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41541-023-00661-7 .
> Now that we have some such data, we see that indeed there are some non-trivial long term risks, such as doubling the risk of blood clotting in the eyes
Doubling a miniscule risk. Even if true, this is orders of magnitude less consequential than the benefit gained by giving people the vaccine, instead of maintaining the blind group.
That not true.
Important steps were skipped or shortened.
For example, blinding was broken a relatively short time after the beginning of the trial. Participant were notified whether they were part of the trial group or placebo group.
This makes the trial useless for the possibility of long term side effects.
reply