> Control group(s) were given vaccines after 14 days
I saw some conspiracy theory that said this weeks ago and just shook my head at how ridiculous that would be. At least it seemed like a conspiracy theory because my view of control group was apparently something else.
Emergency use authorization, for a vaccine that was never tested on humans, and both Pfizer and Moderna eliminated the control groups?
What the hell!? There must be… other or new control groups right? You can’t really have phase3 trials and reference nothing for control can you? What will they reference?
I thought there was going to be a two year control group because that was the plan published on ClinicalTrials.gov run by NIH.
> The moment somebody in a trial could get vaccinated via some other channel, they'd drop out and get unblinded
If this is such obvious common knowledge why wasn't it in the plan? Why isn't it in the training?
I am 100% open to fundamentally and drastically changing the way we test medicines and vaccines et cetera, but that's very different than just making decisions willy nilly that just so happen to align 100% with shareholder interests.
>Presumably more people are getting sick and dying in the control group.
In the Pfizer mRNA vaccine clinical trial there were actually more deaths in the vaccine group than the control group, but the sample size wasn't large enough to draw any conclusions from this.
That is misleading at best. It absolutely is part of an ongoing clinical trial regardless us if it is authorized for emergency use.
How many people who were given the vaccine were told that it is part of an ongoing clinical trial, authorized for emergency use, and the data from the trial won’t be available for years? I suspect a very small percent.
> What the hell is going on when we are silencing senior scientists who are extremely worried about an experimental drug that we're giving to the entire world??!
What exactly is “experimental” about a vaccine that has not only been through very robust phase III clinical trials, but has also had literally billions of doses deployed?
>They are declining the vaccine because of misinformation and tribalism.
I know this is anecdotal, but my experience has been that many people are waiting until long term testing is complete. Remember that the FDA Approval letter for Pfizer indicated that they would need until June 2025[1] to complete testing on the myocarditis and pericarditis upticks in the young males who have taken it.
If the FDA says testing isn't complete on long term issues, why is it crazy that some people would rather wait until it is? Especially with all of the recent deaths of young healthy male athletes in 2021.[2]
I may have misremembered slightly but I seem to recall 42 days fromm sequence identification, leveraging a roughly 10-year project related to related coronavirus work (MERS).
So, not exactly a weekend.
Also, there were several candidates developed in parallel, but others failed at various trial stages. Less effective testing (and your proposal is less effective, both for safety and efficacy) might mean people get vaccines sooner, but it also means they get less effective and more dangerous vaccines sooner, meaning more people die of vaccines (bad for first order effects, and worse for the second order effect of increasing public vaccine reluctance) and that instead of stopping spread by vaccination we increase the selective pressure for diverse, resistant new variants without doing so.
>Are there clinical trials which mix and match vaccines, e.g. as boosters?
Why do clinical trials when you can do live trials for free.
Just wait a few month and look at the situation in France.
France bought a huge stock of Moderna but people there only want Pfizer, so now they have a huge stock of Moderna and a shortage of Pfizer. So to re-balance their inventory they decided that people over 30 can no longer have the choice of what vaccine they get.
And they have also recently speed-up vaccination effort by requiring to have a less than 7 month injection/contamination after January the 15th or be severely constrained in daily life. So in about two months, you'll have a huge influx of guinea pigs data.
So if you just turned 30 and never vaccinated you are up for the Moderna huge dose that they tell you they consider not safe for people a few days younger than you are, (and the dosage was probably too heavy because it has now been reduced for the boosters).
> So they’ve been lying to us about vaccine boosters not being necessary
No, they have not; CDC had previously said that the data did not weigh in favor of boosters yet being needed and that the priority was reaching the unvaccinated population with initial (whether one or two dose) vaccination, but that they would continue to monitor effectiveness data and evaluate the need for boosters.
The data has evolved, and boosters have already been authorized for a narrow immunocompromised population. The understanding has long been that boosters would likely be necessary if active general spread continued, though exactly how long it would take and whether spread would continue that long was not.
> Also how did all these people manage to get a third shot?
Most people who have gotten a booster are probably in booster trials; evidence of both need and effectiveness of the treatment in serving the need tend to be required for approval, even emergency authorization.
A few people may have outside of trials since the EUA for the immunocompromised, but that just came out.
> The same presentation slide describes “Other benefits likely uncertain at approval and only clearer after the vaccine is used” to include the vaccine’s “long term protection,” “prevention of infection (asymptomatic cases),” and “prevention of virus transmission in the community - needs specific studies post-approval necessary to show.”
This implies they only checked it reduces symptoms in affected. Transmission prevention and long term immunity would be tested at later point.
So what was then the point of getting everyone vaccinated? Weren't vaccines supposed to contain its spread?
When I got vaccinated for various diseases, it gave long term immunity, not 4 doses over months to lessen the symptoms.
> There is also a huge flaw in the testing of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines: they didn't test everyone. Only people with symptoms (whatever that means) were tested (PCR).
Wow, do you have a source for this? That's quite a stunning difference and really should put the ~~Pfizer~~ BioNTech and Moderna vaccines in doubt if the aim is herd immunity.
> why not just give every 5th person vaccinated in some large center a link and a code to enter observed side effects after 1 day, 3 days, week, and a month, and then maybe 3 months after into some website.
The CDC ran such a study. IDK about results, or how many people participated.
> Yes, with the control group you would have a base for how many people you would have expected to be infected, so there's that, but you "could" get that from other observations.
Getting this number for a distribution of people as similar as possible to the people in the experimental group is, in fact, the primary purpose of having a control group. There is no better way to predict this number, as you can't predict how likely a particular person is to catch coronavirus at a particular time, in a particular location.
You also need a control group to get the number of various medical problems expected in the experimental group, even if the vaccine doesn't cause them. This also depends on time, place, and behavior.
So, if you create a reason for people in the control group to behave differently from experimental group, for instance by letting people find out which group they are in, you defeat the purpose of having a control group.
>But the Phase 2 trials already proved the vaccine to be safe
This sentence implies that it is not possible for any unsafe condition to remain undetected until some time after the phase 2 trial is completed. Is that actually a claim you're making?
> If it only took 2 days to create the vaccine, why do they not have an updated one?
There's a deafening silence every time somebody asks this.
From what I've been able to see, it's because regulatory bodies won't accept an update vaccine without 8 months of testing, and the manufacturers are doing the testing, but at those delays there isn't really any point.
Why regulatory bodies won't accept updated vaccines is the more interesting question.
> which was that variant-specific vaccines for Delta and Omicron were tried, found less effective than the the existing vaccines, and abandoned
> It turned out that the original vaccine is as effective for Delta, so that work was shelved. Omicron, on the other hand, seems to be evading the immunity created by the Alpha vaccine, so they are actually planning to start producing an Omicron specific booster (or more correctly Alpha+Omicron) after FDA approval.
???????????
The thing he said may not have been strictly accurate but your claim about what he said is much less accurate than that.
I saw some conspiracy theory that said this weeks ago and just shook my head at how ridiculous that would be. At least it seemed like a conspiracy theory because my view of control group was apparently something else.
Emergency use authorization, for a vaccine that was never tested on humans, and both Pfizer and Moderna eliminated the control groups?
What the hell!? There must be… other or new control groups right? You can’t really have phase3 trials and reference nothing for control can you? What will they reference?
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