EXCERPT:
" If you read the paper, you might well have wondered about that 18,860 number and even checked Table 1 to make sure it’s accurate (it is), since the third paragraph of the Abstract, under the headline “Results,” has very different figures:
A total of 43,548 participants underwent randomization, of whom 43,448 received injections: 21,720 with BNT162b2 and 21,728 with placebo.
So how did the researchers get from 21,720 injected with the vaccine to the 18,860 in the “Main Safety Population”? This sort of thing confirms the impression that this is a very incomplete or sloppy study.
It is really not clear where the difference between the 37,706 and the 43,548, or for that matter, the 36,520 total subjects in the Tables 2 and 3 (Efficacy) come from. I used the 37,706 and hence the 18,860 that went with it from Table because it gave slightly smaller numbers than using the Table 2 and 3 figures, but they would be close to each other.
My concern here is the 6000ish discrepancy between the figures in the main text compared to the tables. Were they excluded? If so, why? I could not make heads or tails out of this, and accordingly kept it out of the body of this post. This kind of inconsistency really needs to be hashed out with the actual source data in hand, and should have been explained in the article, even if just in footnotes. "
Quite interestingly, as the author notes, a Grade 4 (life-threatening event) was reported in the Journal of American Medical Association[1] by a nurse who participated in the trial, but was seemingly hidden in the results.
Also, only 9 subjects had severe Covid-19 symptoms in the placebo group, while only 1 had it in the vaccine group, which is not a great difference. Besides, Covid-19 symptoms in the vaccine group could have been misinterpreted as vaccine after-effects.
As a lot of money is at stake for Pfizer, the subpar study and the apparent misreporting is very concerning. I don't think we should trust Pfizer with our health at this point.
I see a red flag in the author not including any sort of bullet-point summary of concerns.
If they have serious concerns, and would like clinicians and researchers to take a look at them, it's not going to go too far without some sort of an abstract or brief summary table.
When you structure it instead as a longform blog-post with no summary it limits the ability of busy people to quickly check into and either comment on, validate, or debunk the concerns in a systematic fashion.
A set of very brief bullet points could just be emailed to Pfizer, FDA, whoever with request for comment, and those points could be quickly addressed.
4 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 16.4 ms ] threadEXCERPT: " If you read the paper, you might well have wondered about that 18,860 number and even checked Table 1 to make sure it’s accurate (it is), since the third paragraph of the Abstract, under the headline “Results,” has very different figures:
So how did the researchers get from 21,720 injected with the vaccine to the 18,860 in the “Main Safety Population”? This sort of thing confirms the impression that this is a very incomplete or sloppy study.It is really not clear where the difference between the 37,706 and the 43,548, or for that matter, the 36,520 total subjects in the Tables 2 and 3 (Efficacy) come from. I used the 37,706 and hence the 18,860 that went with it from Table because it gave slightly smaller numbers than using the Table 2 and 3 figures, but they would be close to each other.
My concern here is the 6000ish discrepancy between the figures in the main text compared to the tables. Were they excluded? If so, why? I could not make heads or tails out of this, and accordingly kept it out of the body of this post. This kind of inconsistency really needs to be hashed out with the actual source data in hand, and should have been explained in the article, even if just in footnotes. "
Also, only 9 subjects had severe Covid-19 symptoms in the placebo group, while only 1 had it in the vaccine group, which is not a great difference. Besides, Covid-19 symptoms in the vaccine group could have been misinterpreted as vaccine after-effects.
As a lot of money is at stake for Pfizer, the subpar study and the apparent misreporting is very concerning. I don't think we should trust Pfizer with our health at this point.
[1]https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
If they have serious concerns, and would like clinicians and researchers to take a look at them, it's not going to go too far without some sort of an abstract or brief summary table.
When you structure it instead as a longform blog-post with no summary it limits the ability of busy people to quickly check into and either comment on, validate, or debunk the concerns in a systematic fashion.
A set of very brief bullet points could just be emailed to Pfizer, FDA, whoever with request for comment, and those points could be quickly addressed.