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Comment by tilolebo | Hacker News Reader

"Pfizer’s and Moderna’s clinical trials of the vaccines, which involved tens of thousands of people, did not find serious adverse events caused by the vaccine. But both studies excluded people with a history of allergies to components of the COVID-19 vaccines; Pfizer also excluded those who previously had a severe adverse reaction from any vaccine. People with previous allergic reactions to food or drugs were not excluded, but may have been underrepresented."

Is this the regular procedure for vaccines clinical trials?

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You can start with any group. After a successful study, you have a product for this specific group.

Afterwards you can broaden the group having enough money for a more detailed study.

Yes, young and strong, male (to avoid risk of pregnancy)

This is a gross overstatement.

They excluded a very tiny part of the population (my guess is under 0.1%), nowadays you cant find a material that no one is allergic to.

The question GP answered was whether this was normal procedure for vaccine trials, not what happened during this particular one.

Pfitzer and Moderna vaccines were tested on both males and females.

That's a problem, it seems. Covid is mostly lethal among older population. Those people take a lot of various drugs. And it looks like that particular population was avoided during trials. Various allergies are also widespread these days. If the vaccine is only for very healthy 30 years old who typically does not have any covid symptoms then what's the point?

Another thing is lack of information how vaccine affects fertility. Probably it does not, but not testing it causes the spread of craziest conspiracy theories.

One more problem was really small trial group. It sounds like it was huge - 140K in case of Pfizer vaccine - however only less than 200 people were diagnosed covid, 95% of them were in placebo group, which proves that vaccine works, the question is how strong this proof is.

It doesnt have to be a perfect wall against the virus. We need to move to herd immunity and get the r score down.

https://xkcd.com/2400/

The data is really convincing even with only around 200 cases. I linked the XKCD comic, but the real data actually looks like that. It doesn't matter much if it is 90% or 95% effective, which might be hard to distinguish with this number of cases. But it is easy to say that the vaccine works in general, even without detailed statistics.

And more importantly, for the question of safety the whole trial with more than 40,000 people matters, and that is a very large trial.

> If the vaccine is only for very healthy 30 years old who typically does not have any covid symptoms then what's the point?

Obviously the point is to vaccinate that group. You cannot seriously be suggesting that at this point, in the middle of a global pandemic, a vaccination is not valuable unless it covers 100% of the population. Right now even a vaccine that would only work for 1% would a a useful improvement over status quo where no-one is immune except previously infected. That said the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will work for a much much larger part of the population and potentially allow us to reach herd immunity even if a small part of at risk individuals will not be able to take it. That will be a huge benefit to those people even if they don’t get vaccinated themselves.

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