Covid Vaccine Trials: How comparing Apples with Apples has gone wrong

Abstract

with its high infection rate, choked the health care systems around the world. It severely impacted the economies of almost all the countries. Many developed and developing countries had actively partaken in the vaccine race. Medical science teams worldwide had successfully come up with vaccines within a short span, which is an impossible feat a few decades back. The vaccine's effectiveness is typically tested in multiple phases, and it enters its first phase only after it is proven harmless on animals. The initial phase involves a small group of participants, typically less than 100, administered with the vaccine in small quantities. They will be monitored to determine whether the vaccine is safe, tolerable, and causes any side effects. In Phase-2, the number of volunteers would be in hundreds. Medical teams would determine the dosage of vaccine required to trigger the immune response during this phase. Phase-3 trial is the macro version of the first two trials, the number of volunteers would be in thousands, and the volunteers are from different geographies to capture the demographic variability. The experiment should be randomized controlled where the volunteers on whom the experiment is conducted are split into two groups, vaccine and placebo. The assignment into these groups should be completely random, and the entire experiment should be conducted under similar conditions. The vaccine group receives the vaccine, and Placebo groups won't receive the vaccine.