So this article makes a big deal about the omission of exclusion criteria, but one commenter points to the protocol, which apparently lists them, and I found this page on Pfizer's website, which is also quite detailed about the exclusion criteria. While this doesn't invalidate the entire argument, it's not a good sign for the credibility of the (anonymous) author.
The allergy side effects were to be expected, it's one of the few actual situations where taking a vaccine can seriously harm you. It seems extraordinarily foolish of them to have administered vaccinations to people with severe allergies, surely that's a standard question you would ask patients?
I guess we'll see in the coming weeks how careful they're going to be about screening.
Side effects was one one portion of the article.
They didn't even look at whether or not it will keep people from transmitting the disease, which is important if we're going to use the vaccine to achieve herd immunity.
They also lumped everyone over age 55 into the same bin, so it's not clear how effective it is for the people at the most risk.
A lot of that is because of the emergency nature of all this unfortunately. Proving it doesn’t transmit disease will take longer and while is the ideal end point an acceptable one at least in the short term is preventing severe disease. This isn’t at all uncommon with vaccines, as the polio vaccine doesn’t actually prevent the transmission of polio. It just prevents you from getting sick from polio.
The main goal short term is to take strain off hospitals and prevent deaths. That’s why the most at risk are being vaccinated first even though they might be far less mobile than the 20 yr old college kid
At the least, they employed some techniques in their study that could make the vaccine seem safer and more effective than it is.
