4 ms·

Why would the reasons used to exclude those cohorts in the first place not be used to determine the vaccine is unsafe for said cohorts?

• refurb 6y ago
  Noise in the data and ethics. Noise in the data - you want as clean a population as you can get. If you start including people with chronic conditions, as soon as someone in your trial dies you get to play a game called "prove that it wasn't the vaccine that killed them". Same with people over 55 years old - they are known to respond differently to vaccines. The worst thing in the world would be showing a 49.4% reduction in Covid infection rate (the FDA wants 50% minimum) and then being forced to do a bunch of handwaving about how your results were skewed by the 55+ patients in your study and "by gosh, I swear it would be over 50% if we adjust for them using this methodology we just made up". Nobody will believe you and you'll be relegated to "that vaccine that almost works". Ethics - Kids aren't (well, very rarely) dying from Covid, but they could die after getting your experimental vaccine. Kids sickened by experimental drugs makes for bad press, not only you, but also the FDA. Easier to just exclude them for now.