I'd say that hiding potential issues with a vaccine, where regulations have already been eased to speed up its rollout, is about as damning as it can be.
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!
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.