shpalman wrote: ↑Fri May 21, 2021 10:36 am
The point about
that XKCD is that lots of things can kill cancer cells, but the difficult part is to kill the cancer cells without killing the person they're in.
What you do, grandma, is you take the shell off the eggs first & then pop them in your mouth...
shpalman wrote: ↑Fri May 21, 2021 10:36 am
AstraZeneca kept saying that their vaccine should work in older subjects, despite not having Phase III data on them, because they demonstrated the same antibody response as younger people (in Phase II). I mean, you still need to actually try it in lots of people, but you've got to at least know it's not going to be a waste of time. I did complain about that at the time though, I mean, what's the point of Phase III if you're just going to insist on rolling out the vaccine based on the Phase II results. You're basically doing an uncontrolled experiment on the entire population. The UK is lucky that it was the right call.
Yes, you need to do the studies. BioNtech's boss is just giving a rough range of where the results are expected to end up.
Whilst biology can be a tricky bugger, there are certain relationships that we do understand reasonably well and sometimes surrogate biomarkers can be very helpful. Unsurprisingly, however, nobody is taking his word for it & real world data studies are being commissioned and run to try and get better data based on what is really happening.
It is, however, useful preliminary information because it helps us to know how many people should need studying & it suggests that, while the Indian variant is of concern, there's no need to panic just yet.
What it doesn't mean is that work on improving the vaccines to add important variants will just stop.