I am definitely biased, but I trust the judgement of companies that have successfully developed vaccines over docs who by and large have little experience in drug or vaccine development.
I happen to know personally some of the signatories to the Pfizer letter. I respect their intelligence and honestly.
And I also know that they don’t understand what they signed, in that key underlying assumptions are at best questionable.
Okay, here is the letter. I have marked the key passages…
“As public health experts…” 🙄
What is the justification for 2/3s of folks needing a vaccine that is 75% effective? Can someone point me in the right direction?
Finally, where did the 2 months of safety monitoring after the second dose come from? What is the basis for this time period?
It may be that there are justifications to the latter two points. It would be helpful to cite them in the letter, or at least link to them in accompanying tweets.
If I am bored this weekend, maybe I will dig into them.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
Working as a scientist in industry, it took me a long time to understand the differences between the research I do now & the research I did as an academic.
Too many of my colleagues, facing the reality of vaccine-associated myocarditis, are either burying their heads in the sand or throwing up their hands.
In an effort to promote vaccination, they are making what I believe are misguided actions.
I believe vaccination for COVID is our best way back to a normal life. And we need to be honest with people about what we know.
We also need to acknowledge that there is a great deal we can do to minimize the harms of our interventions.
Regarding what we know—we need to be honest about who is affected, and how frequently. We shouldn’t try to make marginally valid comparisons to COVID. The folks you want to persuade won’t believe you anyway. Most people think differently about an active interventions & disease.
Let’s be clear: 2 months of safety data for a new drug or vaccine is at best marginally better than 1 month for identifying acute AEs. And it has almost no power in identifying chronic/long term AEs.
A 2-month cutoff is not a routine cutoff for evaluating AEs in drug or vaccine development.
Of course, all cutoffs are arbitrary to some degree, but there are typical timeframes that are routinely used: eg 1 month, 1 year.
In the setting of a pandemic, we have to weigh potential risks with benefits. Every day we wait to accumulate more data is a day we are not immunizing.