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Comment by throwaway4good | Hacker News Reader

Maybe they should include a baseline vaccine (say pfizer biontech) in their trails instead of just placebo and their own vaccine.

That would show whether the result is due to new variants of the virus or just different efficacy of the new vaccine.

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You have broad vaccinations already in some parts of the world, presumably that means that the variants that are still spreading are the ones that are less susceptible to the vaccinations.

Do we have another baseline that was conducted in a variant rich environment? In this trial, out of the 134 cases - 124 were due to variants from at least 13 types.

My idea was simply to include an approved wellknown vaccine in the blind trial. So the subject would get either: The new vaccine, the old vaccine, or a placebo.

That would give a hint on what is going.

And it’s routinely done in clinical trials called “Standard of Care” - good idea!

Maybe I am naive but what is wrong with this idea?

I am not sure, may be it might show the Moderna vaccines are just as ineffective (against the variants circulating now). I am not sure anyone would want that, particularly things like these are cropping up

https://austingwalters.com/covid19-vaccine-risks/

You need huge trials to do this.

The power of your trial comes from the "events", i.e. number of people who got symptoms of covid-19. Have 2 vaccinated groups? Not many events.

You need 50% more subjects goes my calculation.

In practice these big trials are run as sloppily as possible to get the desired result. There’s a whole cottage industry of consultants. Think unclear instructions leading to dosing mixups and such. The type of trial you’re proposing is notorious for sloppiness.

More time and money for data that you could get more efficiently? I mean we have some data on the Pfizer vaccine and new variants and it looks like the Pfizer vaccine works fine.

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