As the issue of anti-vax sentiment is a big issue for many countries around the world and undoubtably is costing lives, I would think that questions like this need not be asked via the media.
No thanks. Your attitude is a significant part of our current political dysfunction. Public servants have been replaced by self-promoters and technocrats who share nothing except contempt for the man on the street.
We've already seen issues in recent weeks with the blood clots issue, where the initial breathless media coverage gives way to "the regulators took a look and it seems fine, it's about the normal level of them, and the pause probably killed many more than the clots ever did".
Lay people - including reporters - are really bad at teasing apart normal "how the sausage is made" from "there's an actual issue here", especially with anti-vax propagandists ready to leap on anything with even a hint of confusion.
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7007e1.htm
Don't get mad at Fauci over a personal lack of information.
> The findings of these simulations should neither be generalized to the effectiveness of all medical procedure masks or cloths masks nor interpreted as being representative of the effectiveness of these masks when worn in real-world settings.
I think complaints are justified when CDC officials turn around and do exactly what their report says not to do: interpret the findings as being representative of real-world settings. A year in and with trillions spent, our evidentiary standard should be higher.
Turning this sort of CYA language that's standard in medical research into a scary gotcha is exactly the sort of propaganda the anti-vax folks engage in all the time.
I'm very comfortable with a tentative recommendation based on the lab data for a non-dangerous intervention. If we get observational data a year from now confirming it, even better.
In all likelihood the AstraZeneca vaccine is perfectly fine. But we should have this conversation in public. If people "come to the wrong conclusions," that's fine. It's the price we pay for an open society.
Yes, let's, but let's also factor in "how many people die if we pause vaccinations for several weeks and it turns out not to have been an issue".
1. If there's a serious issue with the vaccine and we kept it quiet, the consequences would be catastrophic. Not only in terms of public health but also in terms of public trust. Even a small chance of this outcome far, far outweighs the number of people who will die due to people wrongly deciding not to get the AZ vaccine.
2. We have a moral obligation to have conversations in public that involve the safety of injecting substances into people. Regardless of "cost benefit analysis," people simply have a right to be privy to these conversations. It's better for things to go worse and respect this right than for things to go better and not respect it.
The issue in question is about efficacy, not some unexpected dangerous drug interaction or side effect.
Somewhat lower than expected efficacy wouldn't be "catastrophic".
When you play this utilitarian game, you can kick the consequences can down the road forever, which is why it's better to think of these arguments in more immediate terms.
Absolutely! That's why I said it has to include:
> "how many people die if we pause vaccinations for several weeks and it turns out not to have been an issue"
as a consideration.
When I say immediate, I'm talking about this:
> 2. We have a moral obligation to have conversations in public that involve the safety of injecting substances into people. Regardless of "cost benefit analysis," people simply have a right to be privy to these conversations. It's better for things to go worse and respect this right than for things to go better and not respect it.
I would rather have more people die in an open society than less people die in a closed one.
I think that is a perfectly acceptable trade-off given the the long-term goal of eliminating polio entirely. I also think it's totally ok to ask people to bravely face a risk to help others (a fairly small one in this case). I even think it can be ok to ask minors, and parents, to take on those risks in some circumstances, and I think polio elimination is one of them. But it's a trade-off that must be done openly, with consent.
Exactly this. Journalists and laypeople are specialists in making mountain out of molehills
But it's said when specialists also do that (with the suspension of the vaccine when the thing it is preventing has a 1000x chance of causing the same problem)
It sounds like they're not getting the type of collaboration they want from AZ, so they've raised the stakes.
I assume that whatever the discussion, it wasn’t going to get resolved quickly so the FDA informed AZ they could not sit on the information and would have to make a public statement.
The actual final data analysis isn’t done (AZ mentioned this in their press release). It sounds like they did an initial analysis of the final data, it looked similar to the Feb interim data, so they said “good enough, go with 79% in the press release” and the FDA was like “wait a second, that wasn’t the agreed upon final data”.
Why isn't the data entirely public with every stats student giving it a go?
That sounds like a recipe for a whole bunch of new charts on https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations to me.
And it's clear enough that literal anti-vax people don't need a real reason. It's hesitancy that is the addressable issue, which is going to be better addressed by building trust than by saying what sounds right.
There are serious issues in both directions here.
I also don't see a prevailing reason why one of the vaccine companies would want to sabotage AZ. They're all at maximum production afaict, and AZ had worse efficacy than Moderna already. If it were corporate sabotage, I would expect them to target one of the superior mRNA vaccines.
AZ is also the one that screwed up here. If they can't submit correct efficacy data, people should be concerned. That raises serious doubts about their internal organization, and looks like we may be relying on government safety regulations to ensure the vaccine is safe. Which were relaxed for this vaccine.
I didn't see a lot of people saying we should keep letting Boeing's MAX keep flying until we could be totally sure that it wasn't just an unlucky streak of drunk pilots. I also don't see a lot of people saying that we should give Boeing lead time to get a PR spin on their latest disaster.
> Media headlines are a really sucky way to do data science.
I agree. They're also the only way that most people are going to encounter this information, which I would argue they have a right to know. I hope that they'll make rational decisions based on the evidence available, but I'd rather they made poor choices with the evidence than good choices without it.
It's my understanding that the EU has a similar concept.
(It's an entirely appropriate use of these regulatory concepts, of course; this sort of pandemic is precisely why they exist.)
This is in addition to the existing powers of article 174, which allows an unlicenced medicine to be rolled out in exceptional circumstances.
Very stupid and unfortunate.
For those reasons, along with the lack of any information as to whether the vaccine has a meaningful effect on reducing transmission, I have decided that the risk (relative to the reward) to me is too high.
> along with the lack of any information as to whether the vaccine has a meaningful effect on reducing transmission
There's substantial evidence coming out on his front. Not enough for the CDC to tweak recommendations yet, but I expect that in the next few months: https://www.reuters.com/article/health-coronavirus-israel-va...
"Data analysis in a study by the Israeli Health Ministry and Pfizer Inc found the Pfizer vaccine developed with Germany’s BioNTech reduces infection, including in asymptomatic cases, by 89.4% and in syptomatic cases by 93.7%."
"More research is needed to draw a definitive conclusion, but the studies are among the first to suggest a vaccine may stop the spread of the novel coronavirus and not just prevent people getting ill."
As you (and the article) say, much more research is needed.
> A separate study by Israel’s Sheba Medical Center published on Friday in The Lancet medical journal found that among 7,214 hospital staff who received their first dose in January, there was an 85% reduction in symptomatic COVID-19 within 15 to 28 days with an overall reduction of infections, including asymptomatic cases detected by testing, of 75%.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
edit: This just came across my feed, published today. See Fig 1 for a chart that doesn't need deep stats knowledge to understand.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2102153#.YFoyawOb...
> As shown in Figure 1A, the percentages of persons who became infected differed according to vaccination status, with infections in 234 of 8969 nonvaccinated employees (2.61%; 95% confidence interval [CI], 2.29 to 2.96), 112 of 6144 partially vaccinated employees (1.82%; 95% CI, 1.50 to 2.19), and 4 of 8121 fully vaccinated employees (0.05%; 95% CI, 0.01 to 0.13) (P<0.01 for all pairwise comparisons).
> The effect of vaccination on the preservation of our workforce has been dramatic. We observed a greater than 90% decrease in the number of employees who are either in isolation or quarantine.
It's right there.
Additionally, perhaps you are better equipped than I to know, but I believe you could control for any risk you perceive (which I think is ridiculous, but to each his own) from having someone inexperienced administering the vaccine by getting it from your GP.
As for the transmission of COVID-19, if you require absolute proof that vaccination will prevent all transmission then you are setting your bar far too high and your position is indefensible.
To start the presumption is that it is very likely that vaccination will at the very least reduce the likelihood of transmission because while there are viruses like Measles that can still be transmitted in such circumstances those cases are the exception to begin with.
Furthermore evidence is building that vaccination against COVID-19 prevents people from carrying loads of the virus that can be transmitted, if you are quite as committed to this line of argument as you seem to be I am sure you can find the published and pre-pub studies out there. I am confident that if you went about booking yourself an appointment for a month from now by the time your appointment were actually up you'd have lots more evidence to avail yourself of - and you'd always have the option of declining at the time!
People don’t trust the vaccine because a lot of them are scientifically illiterate and paranoid. That someone on the Internet sees benefit in hiding something doesn’t factor into the equation. It’s an emotional response, not a fact-based one.