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They performed massive trials, what a lot of people are doing is conflating time to develop a vaccine with time to do trials. The trials were not abbreviated,
by olliej 6y ago
They performed massive trials, what a lot of people are doing is conflating time to develop a vaccine with time to do trials.
The trials were not abbreviated, they weren't below usual sample sizes.
The only difference is the development time for the vaccine, which is only abbreviated due to the massive advance in development time that new mRNA techniques give us.
- petertodd 6y agoThe Pfizer trial had about 20,000 people in each arm. That's just not enough data to detect rare side effects at a rate anywhere near high enough to know that the vaccine is safer than covid itself for younger/healthier populations who aren't at risk. For the young, healthy, 0 to 19 age range the infection fatality rate of COVID-19 is around 1 in 2.5 million: https://gh.bmj.com/content/5/9/e003094 https://gh.bmj.com/content/5/9/e003094 Normally that wouldn't be a big problem, as vaccines are usually rolled out relatively slowly, so population wide monitoring should pick up on any issues. But countries are aiming to vaccinate as close to 100% as they can get within a matter of months.