At this point, given that the quantity and quality of the public data of vaccine rollouts dwarfs the data of vaccine trials in both scope and usefulness, anyone still grousing about vaccine trial data is just playing political football, for the sake of FUD.
It's like arguing about the raw data of the Wright brothers flight, when millions of people are flying around the world on 747s. Was it relevant in the past? Yes. Is it relevant today? No.
You want to know about vaccine safety? Look at excess mortality, hospital admissions, and long-term health problems of the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations, today. Ten billion COVID vaccines have been administered around the world in the past year. Any of the data we've gathered from that is about a thousand times more relevant to literally anything we could be doing, than raw study data.
We have plenty of data. There were several rounds of trials for each vaccine involving tens of thousands of people over many months. What extra special data are you holding out for that the scientists and various national regulating agencies don't require?
As another commented pointed out, we have hundreds of millions of data points in people now post-vaccination and post-boosters, which haven’t detected a problem, and only 12 here in mice, that the authors suggest warrants further study. Which hypothesis are you saying has “no data”?
You're right, it's not data. I'm glad that none of those children have had any issues. Unfortunately, we'll probably never have any real data, as long as the signals that these vaccines aren't exactly safe, especially for young men, keep getting ignored. How many anecdotes and coincidences will it take for serious monitoring to take place?
Double blind randomized controlled trial or it didn't happen.
Can I add preregistered? And big? And published in a serious peer review journal?
And check it was made in human. And check the exclusion list near the bottom of the paper. (I still remember the hidroxicloroquine paper where they get a better results in the treatment group after excluding the dead guy and other 5 bad cases. The control group has no exclusions (nor death), and was not even a real control group, juts an unrelated bunch of guys in another city.)
Anyway, for comparison, the claims that the vaccines are useful and safe come form people that was forced to dot all the i's and cross all the t's, and make a preregistered double blind randomized controlled trial in humans published in a serious peer review journal and with a lot of additional checking and paperwork to ensure it's reliable.
Once you start removing each of the check in that list, the confidence in the result start to diminish.
Is it a shame in your view, that the raw data is not being made easily available? Wouldn't that make it easier to say what is going on?
It seems though that this issue is highly politicised, and that there is no easy way for us to review the real information. We get changes of definitions (the definitions of vaccines, viruses have been changed), the way of reporting deaths was changed (eg dying 'with' not 'of' covid), even what counts as vaccinated is surprising to me (you are only considered vaccinated a full 2 weeks after you have your second jab (presumably the same applies to boosters)).
So, we don't know the terms of what is being collected, and that data is not being provided. For me this is a major problem, and I see no reason for the secrecy.
The vaccines were released to the public barely a year ago. There is no way to know exactly how safe or effective they are, supposing they are. We just don't have the data yet. What we have, however, is an aggressive censorship of any information or person critical of the vaccines.
I'll leave the issue of the comparisons you're drawing, though I'll note that you've drawn them yet again.
> I'm sorry is that your opinion?
It's the result of a peer-reviewed study conducted by the Gamelaya Institute and published in the prestigious journal The Lancet.[1]
> And Russia, like China, have done all they can to obscure standardized third-party testing of their vaccines (because they are worried that less efficacy is a political loss). They limit the data, then turn on their propaganda machines to try and convince people they are the best. Apparently, it works.
> ...
> Results of data handed to them as a honeypot. The first rule of data analysis is you collect your own data, otherwise you could be setup. And China specifically forbid the release of the raw patient data, as I already mentioned.
The phase-III trials weren't even conducted in China. They were conducted by institutes that have nothing to do with the Chinese government in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Turkey, Brazil and other countries. The data is all public and published in reputable, peer-reviewed journals. The WHO and various national drug regulators around the world have evaluated the data and approved the vaccines. The vaccines' real-world effectiveness has since been evaluated by various national health agencies, and the Chilean Health Ministry has published a detailed analysis in a peer-reviewed journal.
I linked to some of these papers in my previous comment, so I don't know where you're getting the idea that the data is secret, or that it hasn't been evaluated by independent third parties. What you're saying here is just factually wrong.
> Gao Fu said what he said, it was translated directly
Again, this is not the case. Gao Fu's statements were not published, even in Chinese. One of the slides from his talk was photographed and posted online. It speaks very generally about vaccines (not even Chinese vaccines in particular), and discusses ways to improve their efficacy. The suggestions are identical to suggestions being made at the time for improving the efficacy of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Someone from a US think tank then claimed that Gao Fu was saying Chinese vaccines were substandard, and that spread in the press. Gao Fu then gave an interview in which he said that he was being misrepresented, but that was just written off by Western news media.
> He walked it back (of course) because his political masters saw it as embarrassing.
Or because his statements were actually misrepresented. If you look at the slide that this is all based on, it doesn't even mention Chinese vaccines. It's very general/vague.
But there's actually hard data on the efficacy of the Chinese vaccines, collected outside of China and published in solid journals outside China, so we don't have to parse the words of a Chinese health official.
> Chinese officials TO THIS DAY publicly claim they need to make their vaccines more efficient.
You linked to a statement by the Chinese Ambassador to the US, who says that in light of the surge in cases in the United States and the outbreak in China, both countries should work together to improve vaccines. It looks to me like a jab at the US for not having the virus under control, concealed behind a supposedly friendly message. As I said before, there's hard data on the efficacy of Chinese vaccines, so we don't have to go parsing Tweets by Chinese diplomats.
To me, the vaccine issue is a pretty good illustration of the problems with reporting on China. A lot of people have the same general sense that you've expressed that there's no data Chinese vaccines, or that the data's being concealed, despite the fact that this is quite provably not the case. This impression is widespread because of really terrible reporting like the NY Times article I linked earlier. If the NY Times were to sow FUD about the Moderna vaccine in the same way, there would be an uproar, and rightly so.
Actually, I would argue we don't have good data from the use of the vaccines. Part of the reason is because all the mechanisms used for reporting things like side-effects, effectiveness, etc. have a litany of confounding variables which haven't been controlled for which could be far better corrected for/isolated with good studies.
For example, when it comes to vaccine side-effects, I don't think there exists a true account for how common the side-effects really are. The most common way to report side-effects (VAERS, and similar national databases) are dismissed due to the self-reporting nature, local GPs frequently dismiss side-effects and tell people to just go home and take a Panadol with zero reporting going on (I had this happen to me - started experiencing severe chest pain 2 days post-Pfizer. Subsequently saw a cardiologist after months of pain and his comment to me was "I'm seeing young people like you daily and your cases are going widely underreported"), etc.
Likewise, when it comes to vaccine effectiveness, there are a million and one confounding variables from % of the population that already had natural immunity, covid variants, health, age, seasonality, societal lockdowns, isolation, etc.
Also, it's important I think for us to raise the bar to the highest possible standard when you're talking about a medical intervention that was forced under significant duress (loss of job, social stigma, public/medical shaming) on a substantial percentage of the world's population. We should not be content as a society to come within inches of worldwide medical authoritarianism without asking some seriously hard fucking questions and imposing the absolute strictest and highest possible scientific standards to justify why.
I'm sorry I guess I wasn't precise. I meant in general I feel like a lot of people would take any untested drug just to not be named anti-vaxer.
But to your point, as I wrote trial data from company that produces said vaccine (given that it's for sure high pressure case and stakes are pretty high) that hasn't been verified by external entities is not convincing to me. And shouldn't be to anyone, isn't peer review and repeatability a part of scientific method?
There's thousands and thousands of pages of trial data, and if there's a significant screw-up, it would destroy public trust in all vaccines for decades.
I'm skeptical that there's such a thing as "best data" when clinical trials were intentionally rushed.
Don't misunderstand me, I supported and continue to support "Operation Warp Speed" and I'm glad we got a vaccine quickly. But let's not now pretend that we have the same kind of data fidelity we normally get with more carefully vetted vaccines.
Its absolutely ridiculous the level of arrogance to presume you can apply some debate-bro logic and talk your way out of NOT HAVING ANY DATA. NOT HAVING ANY DATA means your product fails. End of story, thanks for playing, nice try, go back to level one and try again. NOT HAVING ANY DATA means we deny you authorization to inject our babies with untested vaccines.
All the experts are concerned too. I work in vaccines (not claiming to be an expert) and I'm concerned too. Long-term safety trials take time, and so the question is how long are you willing to wait for the data? Its a shitty situation all around with the loss of human life, the impact to the economy and the politicization of every damn thing.
Except it’s mostly physicians inserting the data. If you compare to prior years you can see a 1000x increase in deaths... it’s a crime to submit a false report and presumably the anti-vaccine crowd would have always posted BS results.
I think you’re being ridiculously dismissive. That system has been used for decades to track at this point.
Unfortunately, it’s the best we have. Ideally, the vaccine of a phase 3 trial for a new drug platform (ie mRNA vaccines) would at least have a good mechanism for reporting. Unfortunately vaers is the only public record we have.
They’re saying “we don’t have any data on long term studies of such vaccines”, which is an important point. There is a risk there, and there’s no obvious way to manage it.
Clinical trials like this are subject to an enormous number of regulatory and statistical controls, particularly if they're in the public spotlight as much as this one is. It's unlikely the true effectiveness of the vaccine will be very different from what they're reporting here.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that there is a huge difference between controlled trials (which are obviously imperfect themselves) and post-hoc analyses of uncontrolled real-world outcomes. There's a big leap of faith in trusting our public health authorities' ability to accurately measure and faithfully represent the real situation.
Just to name one small issue, our only measurements of vaccine efficacy are case counts, covid hospitalizations and covid deaths. Each one of these measurements is confounded by population-level differences in testing rate, testing polices (ie routine testing on entrance to hospital), PCR cycle count, and many other factors. There is no longer a monitored control group, so we can't ever account for any group-level differences or confounds. I've seen no attempt to address these issues.
We also have no access to reliable data about confirmed adverse effects. A year later, it is still very hard for a person to quantitatively assess his/her own age-stratified risk/benefit tradeoff, even with the confounded efficacy measures.
So, given all that, why isn't skepticism reasonable anymore?
They aren't fighting releasing the data. They are fighting spending the massive amount of money it would take to release it quicker than normal. The requested data includes a lot of protected patient medical information that must be redacted and that isn't even needed to independently check on the government's evaluation and decision making in approving the vaccines.
Why would they have collected that information if it wasn't needed, you might wonder. Simple, it is information that is needed if something bad happens during the trial such as a lot of bad side effects.
If the requestors limited their request to what they actually need for what they are claiming they want to do it would go a lot faster. Instead they are making a massively over broad request in bad faith.
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