Covid-19 vaccines and treatments: we must have raw data, now.
The BMJ supports vaccination policies based on sound evidence. As the global vaccine rollout continues, it cannot be justifiable or in the best interests of patients and the public that we are left to just trust “in the system,” with the distant hope that the underlying data may become available for independent scrutiny at some point in the future. The same applies to treatments for covid-19. Transparency is the key to building trust and an important route to answering people’s legitimate questions about the efficacy and safety of vaccines and treatments and the clinical and public health policies established for their use.
Pharmaceutical companies are reaping vast profits without adequate independent scrutiny of their scientific claims. The purpose of regulators is not to dance to the tune of rich global corporations and enrich them further; it is to protect the health of their populations. We need complete data transparency for all studies, we need it in the public interest, and we need it now.
That's fine, as long as nobody acts like they know how it protects people in the future and tries to force it on people.
> and even if you’re a complete sociopath who doesn’t care about the human cost
Or on the opposite end of the spectrum, a complete sociopath who does not care about overriding people's personal medical decisions and moves the goalpost over and over in order to achieve that goal as we were able to see in popular media during the pandemic.
Mandates are rare and restricted to things which are well-established scientifically, like the efficacy of vaccination.
> In this large observational population study, we show a significant association between vitamin D deficiency and the risks of SARS-CoV-2 infection and of severe disease in those infected.
There are many other studies that say the same.
> Whether vitamin D plays a causal role in COVID-19 pathophysiology or just a marker of ill health is not known, and our results should be carefully interpreted, as patients positive for SARS-CoV-2 and with severe COVID-19 had a higher number of comorbidities.
> Further large randomized controlled trials are warranted to determine if vitamin D supplementation can decrease COVID-19 incidence and its severity.
Contrast that with vaccination, which has had large trials and been shown to be highly effective. Continuing to study Vitamin D is clearly a good idea — even if it does turn out just to be a symptom of other problems, that seems potentially useful for early intervention just like BMI — but it's nowhere near as settled a question and as a matter of practicality you have to consider the challenges of something which requires changing daily eating habits relative to periodic vaccination.
For vitamin D on the other hand, we learned long ago that it is associated with better outcomes for infectious and other diseaseses in general and we have all these smaller studies that suggest an association between Covid and vitamin D - even though none of the can compete with the mega trials in terms of vastness of data. At the same time, we know that a large share of people in the Western world is vitamin D deficient. I don't want to move the goalpost too far, but what is a good justification for focussing so many resources on the vaccines and so little on other things that are clearly so promising?