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I am fine with the thoroughness being applied. If they get it wrong the consequences may be much worse.



Good to hear you’re fine with 100000 people dying because we need to adhere to procedure.

There is absolutely 0% chance at the end the vaccine will not be approved. But 100% chance 20 days will have been wasted.


If you are actually familiar with their processes, you could critique them and tell us where they could be improved. It doesn’t sound like you are, though.


So enlighten us! As far as I can tell it’s a bunch of scientists reading the report. There’s a reasonable procedure involving asking questions, responses, waiting, but it takes over a year. So it’s been shortened.

The report is about 15000 people who got the vaccine and didn’t get seriously ill. There’s nothing to judge on that you can seriously do in 20 days, in that time frame you can only look at the basics and these are clear: 15000 people got the vaccine, didn’t get seriously ill and mostly became immune.

It’s a waste of time and time is lives.


I have been exposed to COVID-19 and I had no symptoms. They said I am immune for 6 months. :)


>There is absolutely 0% chance at the end the vaccine will not be approved.

That's not true, I think it's foolish to 100% trust a company to not make any rushed mistakes, lie, or hide some facts, when there are massive amounts of money involved.


It’s not like they suddenly dumped a stack of papers on the regulators’ doorsteps. 99% of all the data they are going to get has been available for a long time and everything they are going to be able to check in their 20 days has been available for a long time.

How are they going to check if the manufacturer fudged the report? Run the experiment themselves again in 20 days?

Edit: by the way in the UK they were prepared properly and the vaccine is approved today. Or would you say they are acting irresponsibly?


>How are they going to check if the manufacturer fudged the report? Run the experiment themselves again in 20 days?

Site and document inspections.


What site? Just pick one of the over 150 trial sites at random? What are they going to see that they couldn’t have seen a month ago?


You'd fit right in with the folks that approved thalidomide.

"Why worry about something that isn't going to happen?"


It would have been impossible to predict the problems with thalidomine by looking at the equivalent report as what is available now for these vaccines.

So looking at it for 20 days isn’t going to help with that. It’s just going to cost 100000 lives.


I see this kind of binary thinking on HN all the time. Every issue has a true/false answer.

In reality life is full of gray and often the correct answer is found "in between".


Either you start vaccinations and people stop dying, or you don’t start and people keep dying. That is black and white.

Let’s look at how it turns out in the UK. Mr. Fauci already ate his words of critique and apologized.


Even if they approve today and the best case happens were are still looking at the same 100000 lives lost. Maybe a handful would be prevented, but no matter what supply ensures that they cannot vaccinate enough people to make a significant dent in that number.


No because if you start later you’ll be done later. The vulnerable population is a really small part so the first batch is already big enough to cover that.




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