[HN Gopher] Pfizer Moderna Vaccine Studies Hurt by Placebo Recip...
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Pfizer Moderna Vaccine Studies Hurt by Placebo Recipients Getting
Immunized
Author : g42gregory
Score : 43 points
Date : 2021-08-06 21:33 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.npr.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.npr.org)
| [deleted]
| AuthorizedCust wrote:
| This is old news, from February.
|
| A Google search on _pfizer moderna studies placebo_ doesn't turn
| up much of anything beyond similar articles. I wonder if the
| close scrutiny of the vaccines in the months following have been
| enough to allay concerns?
| devit wrote:
| Why not use unvaccinated people from the general population?
|
| There would be some selection bias, but it's going to be
| irrelevant for most things.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| truly, a problem you want to have.
| NonContro wrote:
| Not really, because if there are long-term side effects, we
| need to have a control group.
|
| For example, the vaccine used for the 2009 Swine Flu:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemrix
|
| "Pandemrix was found to be associated with narcolepsy from
| observational studies, increasing the risk of narcolepsy by
| 5-14 times in children and 2-7 times in adults. The increased
| risk of narcolepsy due to vaccination in children and
| adolescents was around 1 incident per 18,400 doses."
|
| If you don't have a large section of the population
| unvaccinated, you can't conclusively prove that the vaccine was
| the cause.
| markus92 wrote:
| Not necessarily true. The incidence rates of those are well-
| known. Rarer side effects are impossible to find by comparing
| vaccinated/unvaccinated in a phase 3 and need larger groups
| to be found. That's routine, though. Look at the VITT for the
| Adenoviral vector vaccines, no strict control group was
| necessary to identify that.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| "Problems you want to have" are still _problems_ , after all.
|
| It's just, which would you rather have: a perfectly run trial
| because your vaccine efficacy is so low that your control
| group doesn't feel incentivized to get vaccinated? Or a
| vaccine that works well enough to quell a pandemic, causing
| your control group to jump ship and trash your statistical
| power?
| guscost wrote:
| Either way, the higher-order effects will continue and
| cascade in perpetuity. The world is not a well-controlled
| experiment, and if you think there is an obvious "better"
| choice here which can be separated from all the context,
| then you have no idea how the world works.
| [deleted]
| H8crilA wrote:
| There was a comment here that got deleted. It had something
| cool I haven't seen before: a risk calculator/estimator for
| Covid (both death and hospital admission), for the UK:
|
| https://qcovid.org/Calculation
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Interesting. Especially that it uses a number of
| different "properties" (e.g., post code) to "fine tune"
| the calculation.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| In this case, there is a suspected autoimmune link between
| the similarity of the inactivated viral protein and a brain
| protein that is associated with sleep regulation. The real
| question to ask isn't whether the placebo group was better
| off, but whether people infected with Swine Flu had a lower
| risk of narcolepsy than vaccine recipients.
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(page generated 2021-08-06 23:00 UTC)