Seemingly trivial things that intrigue you
Comments
-
Forum glitch post.
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0 -
How much are they paying?
0 -
For all the comments and criticisms about government strategy during covid, the one thing that I never see getting much focus is the lack of challenger trials. They should have been paying people to be vaccinated and sleep in the covid wards.
0 -
It was discussed, by me for one thing. Were these trials run anywhere else? I believe not.
0 -
-
I thought they were discussed and ruled out as too risky?
0 -
Take 3 days leave, lie around doing nothing and get paid. I suspect quite a few people would do that.
0 -
It was briefly discussed on this forum, but it doesn't seem to feature in any of the public enquiries.
0 -
I think it would have featured had they done it and the volunteers had died though. It would have been very high risk given the mortality rate of Covid in the early days.
0 -
They would potentially have saved many thousands of lives and would be honoured as such. There's always a risk in trials. Maybe not always death.
0 -
Is that the mortality rate based on the number of deaths v number of positive tests, or the mortality rate based on number of deaths v estimate cases?
Lots of people seem to have had it in the first wave but there weren't many tests going around.
0 -
You should listen to me more. This is clear now.
0 -
So the ethical issue is that there was no treatment at the time. This would have distinguished such trials from anything done (legally) before.
The policy decisions also eventually made them moot. That is to say, to my understanding, the decision to approve the vaccines on safety grounds based on a small amount of data allowed widespready use that would indicate efficacy (i.e. the aim of challenge trials) on a population level.
0 -
I understand the ethical discussion, but I don't think it has been considered enough. For example, soldiers are sent to war with the purpose of making the country safer. The risk of their death is accepted in a way that it is not within medicine.
I also think the real world trials took a lot longer to establish the efficacy and that resulted in more deaths.
0 -
That's like judging road safety by practices in motorsport, BB.
Your surmise that a failure to conduct challenge trials resulted in more deaths is probably wrong, because they would not have obviated the need to conduct trials to assess safety. At that stage, as soon as they were judged safe, pretty much any nonzero efficacy would have lead to roll out across a population.
Challenge trials would have removed some ambiguity about the early efficacy data, but that was pretty clear cut anyway and the debate as I recall was on the efficacy for age cohorts not part of the trials. Challenge trials would not have been for those age cohorts either.
0 -
Re: Brian's leg immobilisation. Did you guys miss the bit about muscle sampling?
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
In such trials they take a muscle biopsy. It's usually a fairly deep sample and about 7mm or so. It's quite painful.
Sometimes. Maybe. Possibly.
0 -
Precisely. Was wondering why everyone was worrying about having to sit still. A blood sample is one thing but having bits gouged out of your leg seems less fun.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
The oxford vaccine had been through some tests already, so the main question was efficacy which is what the challenger trials would have dealt with. Some vaccines make the patient more susceptible to the disease, so that possibility needed to be ruled out as that would clearly have been a disaster.
0 -
No. The base technology had been tested. The actual vaccine against the actual disease hadn't. Biotech isnt simple. I don't understand it. But I understood enough to know it isn't simple and I don't understand it.
0 -
Even if not being able to get about for three days hadn't dissuaded me, I'm going off the idea even more now.
0 -
I nearly signed up for the trial, so read all the information they were providing at the time. They seemed pretty confident about the risks involved, but were looking to assess the efficacy. The problem with this for me was that half the volunteers would have received a placebo, and I wanted to have the vaccine.
Then the level of cases dropped massively in the UK, so they didn't really gain much useful info and had to rely on trials in Brazil.
I think they could have learnt a lot more from challenger trials.
0 -
Yes well, we are all the same species, even in Brazil.
And yes, they were confident, but not impartial. That confidence translated into an extremely fast clinical approval.
0 -
In the context of the time:-
- People were scared
- Lockdown was not sustainable
- Bojo desperate for bragging rights.
0 -
The Brazil trial started later than the UK one, so the efficacy findings were delayed.
We are not going to agree on this. I was happy enough with the risks to consider volunteering. I wouldn't have volunteered for a challenger trial, but I'm sure some people would have done.
.
0 -
Would the early hypothetical UK challenger trials have been better than the ones that actually took place? It was a matter of a few weeks and an order of magnitude or two in data volume.
0 -
I thought most of the testing of the Oxford vaccine took place in South Africa if I recall correctly 🤔
Sometimes. Maybe. Possibly.
0 -
If vaccines could have been rolled out a couple of months earlier then it would have saved thousands of lives. I think it is something an enquiry should look at. The conclusion might be it would only have saved a few days, but it would probably be more useful knowledge for next time than the endless discussion about the timing of lockdowns.
1 -
-
Exactly, should have put his children forward for a trial. Even lower risk of death from the untreatable virus.
0
