Uh oh!
Courtesy of Ars Technica:
Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford made an exciting announcement Monday: the COVID-19 vaccine they developed together appeared up to 90 percent effective at preventing disease. But in the days since, that exciting news melted into a pool of confusion after it became clear that the 90 percent figure came about from a complete accident. Now, experts are scratching their heads over what actually happened in the trial and what it means for the vaccine’s future.
The questions all swirl around the vaccine’s dosage regimen. In initial press releases, AstraZeneca and Oxford explained that researchers had used two different dosage regimens to test their experimental vaccine, AZD1222. In one regimen, trial participants received two “full” vaccine doses, 28 days apart. In the other, participants received a half dose of vaccine followed by a full dose 28 days later.
Pooling results from trials in the United Kingdom and another in Brazil, the researchers found the two-full-dose regimen was 62 percent effective at preventing COVID-19—a good, but not great result. The half-dose/full-dose regimen, on the other hand, appeared 90 percent effective—a rather impressive result.
The trouble is, there was never supposed to be a half-dose-full-dose regimen in any of the trials.
Well, this is certainly not something that any of us wanted to hear.
I think on the good news side there are at least two other potential vaccines that also showed incredible results, so unless they also fudged their numbers we should still be on track for a spring rollout of at least one effective vaccine.
Fingers crossed folks.
Sadly, expected this to happen. Bless those people trying SO hard. but a rush to anything……….
They made a dosage mistake for some participants during the first shot. They realize that a mistake was made, but it was decided to continue anyway. By luck the people that got the reduce dose early had a better outcome. The data was not fudged nor was it inflated. They just had two set of people with a different outcome between them. It is not ideal because it increase the size of the error bar, but this was not intentional and actually they got lucky with better results for the sub group. So overall a great success still. The tittle here is grossly misleading.
Sometimes mistakes are helpful. Sometimes harmful. The issue is that they happen at all in high stakes research.
That doesn’t make this vaccine useless as the title suggests. In fact, it makes it more successful. It doesn’t have to be super-cooled refrigerated like the other two. It’s also cheaper.
What if the trumpers are told they must reduce their body temp to -90° for that one vaccine, rather than correctly understand it to be the vaccine needing to be kept at -90°?
Then it would be Hillary’s fault again.
No. There are three. While the half/full done may have been an accident it was a serendipitous one. That particular regimen is more effective. The Astra-Zeneca vaccine is also more effective with seniors and it doesn’t have to be kept super-cooled like the Pfizer one does. They can make a lot faster too.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/qanon-anti-vax-coronavirus_n_5fbeb0c0c5b61d04bfa6921a
https://news.yahoo.com/swedish-government-sidelines-epidemiologist-steered-102636440.html
“By some counts, we’ve now got exactly the same level of spread of the virus that we had in the spring, and that’s about as clear a refutation of Tegnell’s strategy as you could wish for.”
The UK just green-lighted the Pfizer vaccine.
https://news.yahoo.com/uk-authorizes-pfizer-vaccine-emergency-071718543.html
“Britain became the first country in the world to authorize a rigorously tested COVID-19 vaccine Wednesday and could be dispensing shots within days — a historic step toward eventually ending the outbreak that has killed more than 1.4 million people around the globe.
In giving the go-ahead for emergency use of the vaccine developed by American drugmaker Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech, Britain vaulted past the United States by at least a week. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is not scheduled to consider the vaccine until Dec. 10.”