I commend them on this approach, and can only hope that the vaccines are as safe and effective as we have been told.
[1] https://www.bmj.com/content/375/bmj.n2635 - "Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial"
If you are them please reveal yourself and explain how you found nothing wrong with the original article. Most of these comments in the threads just seem like tired knee jerk anti big media / anti vax memes.
I would like safe and effective vaccines, and I would like to know that the vaccines I have been administered have really got the backing of truly scientific trials.
Surely releasing the trial data is a net positive for all the national populations that have paid for it.
That is especially hard since there is simply no way to know for sure whether the vaccine will be "totally safe and effective for them": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29206892 .
And it doesn't help that there have been multiple leaks now regarding companies like Pfizer that have made them appear even more shady. Not to mention Pfizers multiple billion dollar lawsuits/fines in the past. I don't blame some people for being skeptical, nor do I blame them for feeling like they are forced to get something they aren't sure they can trust.
It's hard to just trust an organization that has already done multiple things in the past to make you not want to trust them.
The cases that feel even worse for me are the people who have had previous doses and are coming in for 2nd doses or boosters but have had previous unexplained side effects shortly after the doses. Like side effects that are beyond the "normal" ones. Many of these people have visited hospitals or their family doctors, had multiple tests, and get told that nothing is wrong, or that they are not sure what is wrong. And these kind of cases are often not counted an "adverse effect". I alone have had many people tell me these things. They often again feel forced to get the next dose because of pressure from their employer or government. And it just feels bad giving them the vaccine, because they don't sound anti-vaxx, they sound like they legitimately had a severe reaction to the vaccine. But often doctors and public health agencies will brush these incidents off and pretend like it's not because of the vaccine. They are dismissed and considered an anti-vaxxer making things up. And this really sucks. This is not the way medicine should work.
I heard that there was a public database in US for this sort of thing. But it has it’s own problems about data quality.
We have people who come in to get additional doses and they'll mention having some pretty serious symptoms after their last vaccine and we will be so surprised with how often we are told they went to both the hospital and their family doctor and got zero resolution and the doctor did not report it to public health.
In many cases we just seem them medically inelligble in these cases and tell them they need to go to their doctor and followup more to ensure they will be safe to get another dose.
And this is where I think a lot of the problems with vaccine mandates and pressure from employers can lie. You end up with people who feel like they have no choice to get the vaccine, they have a bad reaction to it, and then doctors treat them like they are lying or that it's no big deal. Then they go for their next dose feeling even more untrusting of science and get another vaccine.
We are ruining a lot of people's trust in science and medicine by how hard these things are pushed. Because of how much push back there is against anything negative with vaccines, it means doctors also often end up with this same bias. They are afraid to attribute any problem a patient has to the vaccine.
I have no problem with vaccines and have 3 doses currently. But I can empathize with these people who feel hesitant and I myself definitely have lost some faith over the last year of doing this work.
It really seems like a lot of scientific and medical standards have been tossed out the window because of politics.
We also have the vaccine safety datalink, which is intended for causal and quantitative studies of the things surfaced in VAERS, etc. it’s based on electronic health record integration across a network of hospitals covering I think about 3% of the US population. It is public as in publicly funded I guess, but not as in public access. You can read the first report here: https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2021.15072
I am reasonably sure the UK has a similar setup, with some passive monitoring system and a much better health record integration story through NHS.
Right, and do you believe that a full release of the phase 3 trial data would convince them? I sure don't. Anti-vaxx is a fundamentally anti-expert stance, and most people have not logically convinced themselves into that position. Give them the full data set and I bet 9 out of 10 would ignore it, misinterpret it, read lies about it, or just assume that the data set is fake.
Transparency in science should include publishing raw data, as apart from re-creating the statistics in the report there is no other way the trial is repeatable.
Furthermore, it’s not obvious full transparency will help. You’re almost certainly not a medical researcher, so it's not clear if you could do anything useful with the full data set. And our experience with VAERS shows that bad faith actors absolutely can and will lie about it. I see absolutely no upside to releasing the full data set, and a lot of downside for those who volunteered for the trials.
It's unfortunate that the anti-vaxx idiots are misinterpreting or decontextualizing their content, but that's the anti-vaxx's fault and it's what they've always done.
Based on their original censored article, it seems like they're heavily invested to make things seem problematic, and carefully avoid any indication that the status quo is acceptable. I don't think it's purely misinterpretation when anti vax people become generally skeptical of govt and pharma corps.
Like could they not just say the vaccine is safe in these articles based on other evidence? They care about people being able to share their posts to Facebook, I can't understand why they aren't trying even a little to reduce the possibility for public misinterpretation.
It might seem obvious to you that the article would be misinterpreted or parts of it taken out of context by a lay public, but scientific publications are meant to be read mainly by other scientists, and this paper was written with that specific public in mind.
Even if this was intended as official public health communication, which it wasn't, public health communication is an absolute nightmare of a minefield. There's absolutely nothing you can ever say that won't be misinterpreted or misunderstood by some people, and the game is all about minimizing the potential for that. It's easier said than done. (And again, this paper was meant to be shared among expert colleagues in the field.)
Given that, a few disclaimers and limitations to help quell public misinterpretation is required. Not to do so is irresponsible.
What does this mean? That article is very specific, and is not sensational. He's been complaining about the BMJ for some time, and not just about these vaccines.
edit: open data is fine and good. The BMJ demanding it here is intentional sensationalism and part of a continuing pattern.
Incidentally, emember that antivax wasn't even a thing until The Lancet unleashed it on the world. Journals are often badly behaved in order to make headlines.