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Originally Posted by jonbxx
Just catching up on this thread and have seem some vaccine hesitancy here, much like in the larger population. I have seem comments here questioning the safety of the vaccines due to the speed of the roll out, questioning the sample (cohort) size and lack of long term safety information.
The questions I would ask are these;
[*]What is a satisfactory cohort size to convince the doubters that a drug is safe?[*]What is the basis on which this number is reached?
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Someone sceptical of the vaccines doesn’t have to consider these questions. In reality a “satisfactory cohort” has already been achieved by the millions of doses now issued worldwide.
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[*]How long is long enough to judge that there are no long term effects and again, what is this based on?
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This question is pertinent however.
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[*]Do doubters look at trial data for other drugs on the market to judge sufficient trial robustness?[*]If not, why not? What is special about this vaccine?
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The key difference here is, in general, people take medication to control their symptoms/illness. There’s a clear, obvious benefit to them and in the vast majority of cases medication will have been used on (in trials and in reality) people
just like them with such symptoms for treatment.
The benefit if the vaccine (on a personal level) isn’t obvious - the amount of messaging around the vast, vast majority of people only getting “mild symptoms”.
If you said to someone you’re going to catch a cold this weekend, or you can take this medication developed a couple of months ago. By the way, if anything goes wrong neither the manufacturer, Government or the person who injects you with it has any liability. Most people, I’d imagine, would just take the cold.
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[*]Is there still confidence in drug safety evaluation performed by regulatory agencies in light if the speed of approval for COVID vaccines?
This article gives data in table 1 on the cohort sizes for a number of vaccines approved by the FDA from 2000-2011. Some of the cohorts are pretty small! - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3551877/
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