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Comment by IronRanger | Hacker News Reader

What was the age profile of the trial? If you fill it with healthy people under 50 during Summer you would expect the same results with a placebo, given the profile of the virus.

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  Is anyone else on HN depressed by the number of people who seem to think - "AHA, based on not reading anything, I believe there is a meaningful chance that the whole medical and regulatory community just missed this extremely obvious possible flaw that just popped in my head?"
  Do people really think that the most-publicized clinical trials of our times were conducted by over-reaching noobs?

Second paragraph in the article, it says there were 30 severe COVID cases in the placebo group; unless there trial was ridiculously botched the age profiles of the intervention and trial branch are going to be identical. With the reasonable caveat that definitive answer can only be given once we have read the full trial report.

They would never be that dumb to do that. In fact "The Phase 3 COVE study was designed in collaboration with the FDA and NIH to evaluate Americans at the highest risk of severe COVID-19 disease. As of today, the COVE study includes more than 7,000 Americans over the age of 65"

https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...

That would be a likely outcome even under the null hypothesis in a phase II trial, but, for a 30,000 person efficacy trial, I wouldn't be so quick to offhandedly dismiss the assertion that that's a significant result.

Here's a starting point for your search https://investors.modernatx.com/static-files/34f97bb2-d89a-4...

I've found the answer starting from there. Good luck.

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