3 ms·
FWIW, N=94 seems ridiculously small to me. I realize there's ethical concerns in increasing exposure etc but in my experience, that's in the ballpark of sample
by teorema 6y ago
FWIW, N=94 seems ridiculously small to me. I realize there's ethical concerns in increasing exposure etc but in my experience, that's in the ballpark of sample sizes where unacknowledged heterogeneity can be manipulated to distort findings.
I'm not suggesting Pfizer is up to something nefarious, just that the biomedical literature is littered with studies with N < 100 for the outcomes of interest and they don't replicate. The N > 40k in some ways is irrelevant if none of those participants have the processes in play. It's more like recruiting N >40k to get N=94 to study.
I'm also not suggesting with 90% effectiveness that there's probably no effect, just that my guess is a true value of 60% isn't outside the realm of possibility once you consider all the factors that could be in play besides the random sampling variation that's assumed by their tests.
- phaemon 6y agoSeems fine to me. 85 people from the placebo group caught covid. If the vaccine was completely ineffective you'd expect roughly the same number in the vaccinated group. The actual number was 9. What you're saying is the 9 is pretty close to 34 (60% effectiveness). No, it isn't. You'd need to quadruple the number of vaccinated cases to get there. Even if you double them, you're still at 80% so I'd take that as the realistic worst case. Edit: Also, this is BioNTech's vaccine, not Pfizer's. They partnered with Pfizer as they have the facilities and scale for a massive rollout, but it was developed by BioNTech. I wish they were getting more credit in the US & UK coverage.