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Comment by chrisvxd | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that they've been carrying out a rolling evaluation that has been going on for the duration of the trials, which has helped accelerate the normal process.

Having said that, I believe the EMA (EU) also carried out a rolling evaluation, so I'm not sure what the differences are there.

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From what I remember from the news yesterday the EMA will be done with the evaluation (if they don't find anything that causes concern) by the end of the month, so they aren't that far off

You are correct. The meeting for the "decision" (rather, it is a recommendation on which the European Commission acts upon) is scheduled to be December 28th at the latest.

Yeah, and given the political pressure they're likely to do it earlier (I believe they meet every 2 weeks, and they received the application documents with the complete data set on monday). Dec 28 is their "no later than" internal deadline. The EC has already said they'd hold an emergency meeting to formally approve immediately after.

Yeah, there’s only about 5000 deaths extra for each day of delay. So no rush there!

I'd rather they take a reasonable amount of time to evaluate. It's just the reality of things. A lot of those people would have lived if they had stuck with the plan to distance and wear masks but here we are.

So easy to use an ill-defined group of disobedients as the scapegoat. Back in the real world the effect of the masks recommended to the public is marginal at best.

Delaying vaccines is not ‘just the reality of things’. It’s a political decision with grave consequences. One country makes one choice, another makes another choice. The reality of things is that choice decides wether people live or die. There is no way to shift the blame away from that.

I bet everyone there wants to get the vaccines out of the door as fast as possible. That does not mean that people are willing to cut corners where they should not.

So are you saying the UK cut corners?

That's one of the possibilities I had in mind when I started the thread. Look at my top level comment so see what I asked exactly.

Don't forget people have been working on coronavirus vaccinations for nearly a decade.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3586247/

If people don't trust that the vaccine is safe, they will not take it, which will basically throw away a year of vaccine development and lower trust in vaccines in general and prolong the pandemic.

Doing the theatrics and vaccinating people are not mutually exclusive. There’s plenty of people who want to get vaccinated now, so they can go first while the people who don’t can wait for this ‘necessary research’ to be done.

I am fine with the thoroughness being applied. If they get it wrong the consequences may be much worse.

Good to hear you’re fine with 100000 people dying because we need to adhere to procedure.

There is absolutely 0% chance at the end the vaccine will not be approved. But 100% chance 20 days will have been wasted.

If you are actually familiar with their processes, you could critique them and tell us where they could be improved. It doesn’t sound like you are, though.

So enlighten us! As far as I can tell it’s a bunch of scientists reading the report. There’s a reasonable procedure involving asking questions, responses, waiting, but it takes over a year. So it’s been shortened.

The report is about 15000 people who got the vaccine and didn’t get seriously ill. There’s nothing to judge on that you can seriously do in 20 days, in that time frame you can only look at the basics and these are clear: 15000 people got the vaccine, didn’t get seriously ill and mostly became immune.

It’s a waste of time and time is lives.

I have been exposed to COVID-19 and I had no symptoms. They said I am immune for 6 months. :)

>There is absolutely 0% chance at the end the vaccine will not be approved.

That's not true, I think it's foolish to 100% trust a company to not make any rushed mistakes, lie, or hide some facts, when there are massive amounts of money involved.

It’s not like they suddenly dumped a stack of papers on the regulators’ doorsteps. 99% of all the data they are going to get has been available for a long time and everything they are going to be able to check in their 20 days has been available for a long time.

How are they going to check if the manufacturer fudged the report? Run the experiment themselves again in 20 days?

Edit: by the way in the UK they were prepared properly and the vaccine is approved today. Or would you say they are acting irresponsibly?

>How are they going to check if the manufacturer fudged the report? Run the experiment themselves again in 20 days?

Site and document inspections.

What site? Just pick one of the over 150 trial sites at random? What are they going to see that they couldn’t have seen a month ago?

You'd fit right in with the folks that approved thalidomide.

"Why worry about something that isn't going to happen?"

It would have been impossible to predict the problems with thalidomine by looking at the equivalent report as what is available now for these vaccines.

So looking at it for 20 days isn’t going to help with that. It’s just going to cost 100000 lives.

I see this kind of binary thinking on HN all the time. Every issue has a true/false answer.

In reality life is full of gray and often the correct answer is found "in between".

Either you start vaccinations and people stop dying, or you don’t start and people keep dying. That is black and white.

Let’s look at how it turns out in the UK. Mr. Fauci already ate his words of critique and apologized.

Even if they approve today and the best case happens were are still looking at the same 100000 lives lost. Maybe a handful would be prevented, but no matter what supply ensures that they cannot vaccinate enough people to make a significant dent in that number.

No because if you start later you’ll be done later. The vulnerable population is a really small part so the first batch is already big enough to cover that.

The UK has put a lot of effort into speeding up the roll-out of these vaccinations in general. Enough that it basically leaked the fact some kind of Covid vaccine was coming a few weeks in advance because so many people were involved in the pre-planning and the timescale was so aggressive.

You make it sound like a bad thing. It was never a secret the vaccines were coming and as each day of delay means 5000 people dying I think putting a lot of effort into speeding up the rollout is pretty well worth it.

Ummm, latest daily UK deaths "with Covid" is 414, not 5000.

Ref: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk

Latest daily EU deaths with COVID is about 5000.

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