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Originally Posted by Hugh
No one said that - however, the amount of people involved (funders, Principle Investigators, researchers, Research Students (grad & post-grad), peer reviewers, Research Ethics boards, support staff, civil servants, etc.), I find it hard to believe that nothing would have leaked if there were any shenanigans.
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Not all of those people would necessarily have access to, or input at the stage of monitoring the MHRA yellow card system. Someone somewhere has to decide what constitutes statistically significant and then do a benefit/risk analysis. Get a couple of behavioural scientists hanging about to carp on about undermining the “get vaccinated” message and voila you just raised the bar, despite knowing there’s a risk.
For a full clinical trial yes you couldn’t outright fabricate findings. Where anomalies arise they’ll get clearly identified (e.g. the first AstraZeneca press release rushed out the day after Pfizer’s). However once you are into modelling and “best guess” scenarios - including prescribing medications in conditions outside those seen in clinical trials - you are suddenly relying on smaller subsets of results and analysis and selective studies.
These don’t necessarily need to stand up to scrutiny long term - just long enough to get a few favourable press releases before someone, somewhere points out that your subset of the population might be disproportionately young, disproportionately less likely to be disabled, more likely to have been previously infected, etc.