That BMJ op-ed is just silliness. Of course the primary...

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    That BMJ op-ed is just silliness. Of course the primary end-point of these trials is "just" a decrease in the rate of symptomatic infection - because that's the first thing to become clear - and in a situation like this, every day counts. Even if all it did was make most infections asymptomatic, that would be an enormous win. But despite the fact that these are early results, the signs from the Moderna trial are much better than that. At the time they reported they'd seen 95 cases of COVID in their trial cohort - 90 in the control group, 5 in the vaccine group. Of those 95 cases, 11 were severe - all of which were in the control group. So the evidence is already mounting that the vaccine does exactly as expected: by training the immune system to recognise the spike protein as it appears on the virus shell, early infection is blocked - and in those cases where the virus does manage to break through and gain a foothold, the severity of the infection is much reduced. It takes a very, very "special" kind of mind to take that and twist it into yet another conspiracy theory.
 
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