Brazilian researchers testing China’s Sinovac Vaccine said Tuesday that full data showed it to be 50.38% effective against Covid-19 in late-stage trials, almost 30 percentage points lower than previously announced, as concerns grow over the study’s transparency.
The São Paulo-based Butantan Institute said last week that late-stage trials had shown the CoronaVac vaccine to be between 78% and 100% effective, offering total protection against severe cases of the disease.
You knew it didnt work when they were buying PFE vaccine doses by the 100M…
But we had such insistence early last year that Xi was fully transparent and doing a great job, and that there was nothing to worry about here in the US?!
Well, to be honest Trump had been openly antagonistic of Cheinah for a long time. You couldn’t take seriously his kudos! and high-fives for the Chinese.
Guidance instituted during a plague in the 16th century included lockdowns/quarantine, six-foot distances, disinfection, sanitary cordons, distance counters in shops.
MRNA first, since that’s a lot easier to prove. This was back in early Sept. here’s their CEO was saying how they were going to slow down trial enrollment to make sure they had enough minorities. Because nothing is more important than minorities (to the left), especially in a country where they are, after all, just a minority of the population.
Moderna, one of the developers in the lead for a vaccine to prevent Covid-19, is slowing enrollment slightly in its large clinical trial to ensure it has sufficient representation of minorities most at risk for the disease, its chief executive said.
When the trial began, he had told CNBC in an interview that data could be available in October in “a really optimistic scenario; maybe November.”
Remember a really optimistic scenario would be one where the vaccine works very well and meets the earlier, weaker statistical tests at the interim reviews that have higher efficacy requirements (75-80% minimum, give or take) needed due to the smaller numbers of people. In the end, they would have 95% efficacy, so there’s a very good chance they could have meet that October optimistic scenario. Except at the start of October, they were still lamenting the lack of selfless minority volunteers and busy turning away lots of eager white volunteers for being the wrong color, so it was time for yet more delays…
Private contractors hired by Moderna Inc to recruit volunteers for its coronavirus vaccine trial failed to enroll enough Black, Latino and Native American participants to determine how well the vaccine works in these populations, company executives and vaccine researchers told Reuters.
To make up for the shortfall, Moderna slowed enrollment of its late-stage trial and instructed research centers to focus on increasing participation among minority volunteers, the company said.
two of the commercial firms said they had received overwhelming trial participation interest from white volunteers. Several researchers said they struggled to overcome the entrenched barriers that traditionally limit minority enrollment.
So they took an extra 1-2 months to find enough of the right people to bribe into joining their trial, thereby slowing down the time they would need to reach two months of post-second-dose vaccination safety data and consequently eventual FDA approval.
How much sooner would that have been without all the racial handwringing and pandering? Let’s say it would have been one month faster, although maybe it would have been more. In December, 77,000 Americans died of covid. January may well be worse, TBD, but the point is that the sooner you start the vaccinations, the sooner you prevent that last, worst month from happening in the exponential spread of the virus. So their leftist sensibilities probably cost 100,000 deaths due to their delays. But hey, it was a really close election and good news too early, well, that would have costs more important than other peoples’ lives.
It’s not pandering to enroll all relevant groups in the trial. That’s the only way you see the response across all of them.
Yes, it’s a challenge to get blacks to trust and participate after our government has historically infected them intentionally with other diseases as guinea pigs. Especially hard to get elderly blacks to participate, as they were alive when that went on.
The trial duration doesn’t delay production, they were already full- steam ahead producing during the trials. That’s the whole point of Gates’, Dolly Parton, other philanthropists, and governments across the world (such as the US “warp speed” branding) funding ramp up and production of multiple vaccine candidates before the results are proven
No, but it delays rollout because the FDA wanted a fixed amount of time, several months, of safety data on a very large number of people who had completed both shots. So the longer you took to get your trial enrolled, the longer before it would be considered by the FDA for their EUA. Yes, they had the vaccines ready, but the regulators wouldn’t sign off on using them, and that’s what the MRNA political choices delayed.
So what? The production totals to that point (a month or two) were insignificant. And a vaccine is useless without adequate data on effectiveness and safety.
The distribution logistics should have been worked out in the interim, instead of a last minute cluster-f scramble currently going on.
And the sooner you get your full trial going, the sooner you get those. Unless of course you decide that 7% black participation isn’t enough, so you have to delay the whole thing for a month while you beat the bushes and waive around a few grand to try to find the right demographics.
Sure, I get you want to have a broadly representative population, but you could have kept enrolling whoever you could find and get the main trial fully underway instead of turning away lots of volunteers for being the wrong color. Then you could have general results ready a month or two sooner, and maybe eventually you get the results for some smaller, less altruistic subgroups later when you finally have enough. if their trial results had come out in mid Oct and the updated “now with even more minorities” results came out in late Nov, that would have sped up the rollout by a month and a half.
I could be missing something (and maybe it’s less of a deal in israel… well, we know it’s less of a deal, but anyways), but it seems not valid to conclude 50% efficacy based on that if no control group, because of selection bias. Can’t the people vaccinated exhibit different behaviors and/or be in different demographic (age, etc) groups than the rest of the general population?
The relative drop off over time (just within the vaccination group) based on time since the vaccination seems more useful, though.