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Re:US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine by oceanplexian on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @12:53PM (#26795261)
Multiple advanced health care systems in the world are independently pulling these vaccines. I wouldn’t brush it off as the FDA being overly cautious. None of these vaccines have been tested in humans for more than 12 months. And you’re assuming that health authorities can wave a magic want and instantly know who is having some kind of undetected brain clotting? I think the risks are extremely unclear even though people are throwing statistics around like they mean anything.
Re:US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine by ggreer on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @01:10PM (#26795550)
Not a single one of those health authorities allowed vaccine challenge trials. That tells you how much they care about saving lives versus how much they care about not getting blamed for any deaths.
Re:US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine by yellow_postit on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @01:40PM (#26796083)
It does appear that challenge trials are starting, a search easily turned up this UK one: https://ukcovidchallenge.com/covid-19-volunteer-trials/

The main benefit of challenge trials is to speed up development as I understand it not to broaden risk estimates.

Re:US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine by ggreer on Tuesday April 13, 2021 @03:24PM (#26797734)
> The main benefit of challenge trials is to speed up development as I understand it not to broaden risk estimates.

Right, which is why it was crucial to have such trials a year ago. We could have shipped vaccines 3 months sooner and saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Unfortunately, no health authority was willing to risk blame for any disabilities or deaths stemming from deliberately exposing consenting people to covid. So we had to use much larger sample sizes and wait longer to know which vaccine candidates were effective.