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Comment by hannob | Hacker News Reader

It's a surrogate outcome. "Prompts immune response" means "we hope it prevents infections". It doesn't necessarily mean it will.

This is still good news. But it should be put in perspective, this does not automatically translate to "this vaccine will work fine in both young and old". It just means we can have some higher hopes that it will.

Only RCT results of the real infections will show if it really works. (RCT for the vaccine is running and first results are expected soon.)

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What's RCT? You mean voluntarily injecting the covid on vaccined very young humans (so negligible risk of death) ?

Randomized Control Trial

Randomized Controlled Trial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomized_controlled_trial

RCT means a randomized controlled trail. GP is confused. This announcement is about an RCT.

Injecting a disease into volunteers is called a human challenge trial. It is a type of RCT, but it is not what is being discussed here.

Randomised Controlled Trial - essentially, take a population, give half of them the vaccine, and half a placebo, and study the reaction.

What you're referring to (voluntarily infecting people) are challenge trials, which are also being discussed, but are still somewhat ethically dubious.

Wikipedia tells me RCT is "randomized controlled trial", that thing they are doing where half the volunteers receive the experimental vaccine and half receive a placebo, and they wait to see how many get the disease (and how many get side effects) in each group. I don't think there's any "human challenge study" (in which they deliberately infect the volunteer, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_challenge_study) so far.

There was a human challenge trial announced a few days ago. I.e. people are volunteering to be infected with the virus in an RCT.

RCT = randomised controlled trial - a trial where some test subjects are given the vaccine and some are given the vaccine, then you follow the subjects and see which ones get COVID and how bad.

There are already a bunch of vaccines going through this process.

Challenge trials is where you purposefully infect subjects. TheY are highlY controversial but according to Oxford, would speed up the research and they are planning to do one.

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