Here’s a chart that Peter Doshi included in his article in the BMJ. (Click to enlarge.)

Table 1
Characteristics of ongoing phase III covid-19 vaccine trials

Source: Will Covid-19 Vaccines Save Lives? Current Trials Aren’t Designed To Tell Us, British Medical Journal, 21 October 2020

What he said about this chart:

Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said, “Ideally, you want an antiviral vaccine to do two things … first, reduce the likelihood you will get severely ill and go to the hospital, and two, prevent infection and therefore interrupt disease transmission.”7

Yet the current phase III trials are not actually set up to prove either (table 1). None of the trials currently under way are designed to detect a reduction in any serious outcome such as hospital admissions, use of intensive care, or deaths. Nor are the vaccines being studied to determine whether they can interrupt transmission of the virus.

It’s not that the vaccines aren’t able to reduce severe illness, reduce deaths, or stop transmission. It’s that the trials cannot tell us that. They would have had to be longer. (If someone is saying these vaccines save lives, well, that’s not the science.) And long trials were not compatable with “Operation Warp Speed.”

I also noted that pregnant or breastfeeding women and immunocompromised patients were excluded. Who knows how these vaccines will affect them? No data.