Recent news suggests they screwed the pooch with their trial arm and accidentally under-dosed about 8000 people if I remember correctly, and their interim calculations for efficacy show that the under-dosed treatment arm somehow were more protected vs. those who received the intended dose. That's pretty weird.
More importantly it fucks with their original power calculations. You calculate in advance how many people you need to treat in order to statistically determine efficacy given the rest of your trial parameters. They elected to include the accidentally under-treated group as essentially a second treatment arm. The problem with this statistically is that 1) not only did they "lose" the 8000 people from the original treatment arm, but 2) they introduced effectively a 3rd group (Full dose vs. half dose vs. placebo). This makes big problems for their ability to statistically calculate efficacy as originally laid out in the trial design as they did not appropriately power the study for 3 treatment groups.
It also turns out they are using an AAV viral vector to deliver the mRNA (vs lipid vesicles which are what Pfizer and Moderna are doing). I am sure the AAV viral vector is safe, but in the past they have had fairly famous issues. Add in the weirdness with the trial design stuff and I feel much more comfortable with the pfizer/moderna products at this point.
It seems counterintuitive that the lower dose has a 90% and the ones with the correct dose is only 65%.
We could isolate Russia totally from the world and maybe they could apply for membership after 2000 years.
Right there with you guys. I'm eagerly anticipating my employer making a vaccine available to all employees, and hopefully their families as well. (As I've stated before on the forum, I'm in a healthcare system's IT department.) I'm tired of having essentially everything I would normally do outside of my house on pause, but I'm also not willing to create unnecessary risk for myself or my wife, so life has gotten pretty boring since the weather flipped to damp/cold late fall/early winter mode here in MN. At least when it was nice out, I could burn off energy/boredom/frustration by biking...
I'm not familiar with what their stats like at all, but that could be an artifact from the way their trial design was messed up. For example, imagine if in that first group it turns out that the demographics were very different than those who got the full dose.
Say, the group that got the half dose was older, or otherwise more heavily skewed towards social distancing, vs if the rest of the treatment group was full of young 20 year olds who were going out to bars. Not saying that's what happened, but just an example to illustrate why it was important for them to have stuck to original trial design. May not be able to statistically determine if that difference is real and why.