Quote:
Originally Posted by Hugh
tbf, they didn’t.
It’s the Sun conflating the funding given by the Government and taking the best possible scenario from the testing (which no one in the real world would ever do...).
As the actual test lab (Oxford Vaccine Centre) says about the Phase 1 tests |
Phase I tests aren't even tests to see if the vaccine works, it's just a safety study to make sure the vaccine doesn't kill people. Phase II will test to see if the vaccine raises an immune response while phase III will test to see if the vaccine protects against coronavirus.
There are some serious ethical issues with phase III as there is no reliable treatment for COVID19 so you can't just be injecting people with virus to see if the vaccine protects. The added wrinkle is that the prevalence of COVID19 in the wild is quite low so you would need to give a LOT of people the vaccine to get an idea if the vaccine protects. We're talking more than 30,000 people.
You can roll up phase II and III together if you're in a real hurry but it is a big risk...