Opinion | Coronavirus Vaccine Trials Could Suffer From Shortcuts - The New York Times

Opinion | Coronavirus Vaccine Trials Could Suffer From Shortcuts - The New York Times

What COVID vaccine trials won’t tell us

Trials of three leading coronavirus-vaccine candidates in the United States are not designed to tell us whether they work against mild or more-severe forms of the disease, write pharmaceutical researcher Peter Doshi and Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute in California. This is a problem because a vaccine might be deemed to work even if it mostly prevents mild cases in young, healthy people. In that case, it might not reduce the number of deaths. Doshi and Topol argue that the trial protocols released last week for vaccines from Moderna, Pfizer and the University of Oxford–AstraZeneca should be modified to focus on severe COVID-19.

The New York Times | 4 min read