How do they make sure that those in the vaccine trial got exposed to the virus? Just allow them to roam around without masks in their daily lives? If they are not exposed, how do they know if the vaccine is useful.
You cannot ‘make sure’ trial participants are exposed to the virus unless you deliberately expose them, as some western politicians and medical ‘experts’ have suggested.
It is because most civilised people tend not to resort of such facist methods that phase 3 trials typically take such a long time and involve such a huge number of participants in order to be successful.
Basically, as the time function increase, so does the chances of people being exposed to the virus.
Now, because you cannot strap detectors to participants to test if they have been exposed, all you can do is wait for enough people to get infected naturally across both the test and control groups to draw statistically significant analysis.
Therein lies my primary reservation with the western mad dash to report results, the number of confirmed cases are so low (across both groups) that any outliers and anomalies are going to disproportionately skew the results.
It is also worth noting that statistically speaking, the higher the sample size, the better approximation it is of the actual effective rate of the vaccine. In addition, the trial runners are not going in blind, and would have some idea of the ballpark efficacy rate of their vaccines from earlier phase 1 and 2 trials.
So, let’s just for the sake of argument say you are the head of Pfizer, you got efficacy rates of 70-80% from phase 1 and 2 trials, you start your phase 3 trial, and after a couple months got preliminary results showing efficacy rates of 99%, then a few weeks later, that drops to 95%, you also got an effective get-out-of-jail-free card from the US government safeguarding against lawsuits wrt side effects from the vaccine. Would you not be tempted to ‘cash out’ with your 95% now rather than wait for it to drop further?
Also, I think it is highly significant that Pfizer’s CEO and EVP offloaded all their shares in the company on the day the vaccine results were announced and share price spiked. That’s as blatant an example of insider trading as you can get, and it looks like they are basically banking on the importance of the vaccine to protect them against government anti-trust investigations. But still, it is a highly dangerous move to make, and one really has to wonder what they know that isn’t public to make them to take such a high risk strategy to cash out. Because there would not a need to take such a risk, and indeed every incentive to hold onto their stocks, because if their vaccine is as good as initial results are claiming, Pfizer’s share prices will only go up and up.
