I don't understand how we don't have a clearly set control group in every single country where there are vaccination programs. Instead of that it's all anecdotes about Romania cases going up because of low vaccination rates (until the cases started to go down, then it disappeared from the news).

Ethics. It is routine to terminate a medical trial early when the results are so clear that you know you are harming the participants by continuing; wheather that harm is by negative effects on the treatment group, or depriving the control group of effective treatment.

Further, once you have an effective treatment, placebo controlled trials become unethical. You must compare your new treatment to the current standard of care.

That seems like a terrible idea for a rushed treatment during a global pandemic. If anything we need as much accurate and scientifically sound information as possible, if we want to make sensible decisions.

However you will probably be downvoted here and shutdown somewhere else just by stating this reasonable fact. The times we live in…

If you look at the Pfizer trials, (the scientific one, not the fact they were taken to court a few times and paid a pretty penny in compensations), their results are hardly “so clear”. 1 person died of covid in the control group, and 0 in the vaccinated group. If you know your statistics, the 95% or so positive outcome is due to relative and not absolute difference.

The trial was not designed to test the efficacy against death. It was designed primarily to test against confirmed covid-19 infection, with a secondary goal of testing against severe disease.

I don't have any insight into their motives, but that's not the trial they performed. The only time blanket testing occurred was to make sure no one in the vaccinated group was going to get counted as a breakthrough case when they got covid before full vaccination. Otherwise they only tested participants when they presented with symptoms, thus "these data do not address whether vaccination prevents asymptomatic infection" [0]. Accordingly, it was not testing Covid-19 infection except to the extent that it presented significant symptoms. The trial also didn't address (not clear how it could have) your ability to keep passing the virus along once vaccinated.

[0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577 (see p 2612 of attached pdf).

> Ethics. It is routine to terminate a medical trial early when the results are so clear that you know you are harming the participants by continuing;

Except that plenty of people already decided they don't want to vaccinate, so why not to ask them to participate? Of course a double-blind study would be unethical.

> once you have an effective treatment, placebo controlled trials become unethical

But this is a vaccine, not a treatment. And given the scale of vaccination, wouldn't it make sense to have a control group for analyzing long-term effects? Yes, I heard many times that long-term effects are "unlikely," but the tiny possibility becomes significant at scale.