I don't think (and find it incredibly unlikely) there's any correlation per se, but quite a few people were hoping to hear certain news on the political front and the COVID front. They heard both in a pretty short window and I'd say that and the effects nationally are interesting.
Many many people are now feeling a lot of stress relief in a short period of time. Should be interesting how this effects morale around the country.
Odds of conspiracy, with a clear hypothesis and confirmation of that hypothesis, go up drastically. That happened here.
It wasn't a super-unlikely hypothesis either. We're talking about announcing a result a few weeks earlier versus later. That's not an unreasonable decision for a blue-leaning businessperson or scientist to make.
What reduces odds are the number of preregistrations. There were dozens about this strong.
My own prior went from 1% odds to maybe 35% odds. Yours may be different, likely based on your prior based on where you fall on the political spectrum. Right-wingers will probably go 35% to 80%, and left-wingers from 0.01% to 1%.
I just want to make the obligatory point that the way the Trump administration has handled the Covid response in the US goes beyond red and blue ...
It's obvious to anyone willing to look at the facts, and to be honest with themselves, that this administration has done a terrible, terrible job of responding to the pandemic which has probably caused the unnecessary deaths of a lot of people.
And that's not a partisan thing to say. Or rather, it shouldn't be ...
Intentionally murdering possibly thousands of people (or tens of thousands? or what, who knows?!) for some assumed political gain is absolutely, 100% an unreasonable decision for any human to make. Intentionally delaying a vaccine would certainly be a crime, no? Not to mention absolutely abhorrent and completely evil.
That is not a "reasonable decision" to make by any stretch of the imagination.
(I note that I don't understand at all what you're asserting.)
You mean delaying the announcement of a vaccine. They didn't delay the process.
I wrote "We're talking about announcing a result a few weeks earlier versus later."
And if that was the goal, I think it worked. It looks like Biden won by literally tens of thousands votes. An announcement a week earlier probably would have swung the election to Trump.
At a cost of zero lives.
If the vaccine works as announced, we're still weeks away from the end of the trial, and months away from widespread distribution.
Massive corporations do have political agendas. I don't think anyone would argue they don't. But maybe it's just coincidence?
This timing is consistent with when we've been told we might see early results all along, really; it shouldn't be that surprising. Expect announcements from other teams over the next couple of months.
There is some incremental work that was done toward confirming this result and typing this press release in the last week.
It’s not like they waited till last week to collect the data. They have ongoing surveillance of their entire study population.
So the difference between announcing preliminary results last week versus this week was their own internal decision on timing.
> The first analysis was to occur after 32 volunteers — both those who received the vaccine and those on placebo — had contracted Covid-19. If fewer than six volunteers in the group who received the vaccine had developed Covid-19, the companies would make an announcement that the vaccine appeared to be effective. The study would continue until at least 164 cases of Covid-19 — individuals with at least one symptom and a positive test result — had been reported.
> In their announcement of the results, Pfizer and BioNTech revealed a surprise. The companies said they had decided not to conduct the 32-case analysis “after a discussion with the FDA.” Instead, they planned to conduct the analysis after 62 cases. But by the time the plan had been formalized, there had been 94 cases of Covid-19 in the study. It’s not known how many were in the vaccine arm, but it would have to be nine or fewer.
> Gruber said that Pfizer and BioNTech had decided in late October that they wanted to drop the 32-case interim analysis. At that time, the companies decided to stop having their lab confirm cases of Covid-19 in the study, instead leaving samples in storage. The FDA was aware of this decision. Discussions between the agency and the companies concluded, and testing began this past Wednesday. When the samples were tested, there were 94 cases of Covid in the trial. The DSMB met on Sunday.
Discussions between the agency and the companies concluded, and testing began this past Wednesday.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/09/covid-19-vaccine-from-pf...