So I work in public health, with public health colleagues. I came up with analyses pieced together from the publicly reported information and think that piece is a little disturbing.
Sure, you can come up with some standard numbers in an hour. But it wouldn't be the most thoughtful analysis, and the decision isn't really about a single efficacy estimate anyway.
I guess I figure if you're going to go down this route of pissing matches over how fast you can do an analysis on how big of a dataset, why the hell even have an FDA anyway? Just require the company post all their information and get rid of the regulation entirely. I actually think this isn't an unreasonable argument, even if I don't necessarily agree or disagree with it. It certainly seems more reasonable to me than "we should have a regulator that just rubber stamps things."
I'm fine with the FDA taking their time. The problem with risk in decisions is people forget in high stakes high risk decision making, it's about the process. This whole discussion about the FDA taking too long will look a lot different if a year from now the vaccine turns out to have some horrible long term effects (which it could, even though I think it's unlikely, just, you know, 'cause).
I think along the lines you're thinking, you would actually want to come up with an expected cost of an infection of an individual ("cost" being in a misery-illness-utility sense, not financial). This would presumably include the average expected illness severity of the person infected but also the average illness burden in others indirectly attributable to that person being infected.
So you'd want to give it first to people who are very likely to become severely ill themselves, and whose infection would cause others to become severely ill, directly or indirectly (eg through disease spread or through lost resources, as if an ER doc in an understaffed area became severely ill).
Not questioning anything you wrote, but it would be interesting to know the strains of virus in people who acquired COVID in the mRNA vaccine trials. I imagine this is in the trial data but haven't seen it.
Someone on an earlier Reddit forum pointed out there's a paratrooper division known as the Paradice at one time (https://old.506infantry.org/hiswwiiarticle02.html). Others pointed out the term has been adopted by any other number of groups, and one person suggested a cipher supposedly with the killer's last name is Paradice backwards. My guess is the misspelling is meaningful too but it's hard to say how.
Sure, you can come up with some standard numbers in an hour. But it wouldn't be the most thoughtful analysis, and the decision isn't really about a single efficacy estimate anyway.
I guess I figure if you're going to go down this route of pissing matches over how fast you can do an analysis on how big of a dataset, why the hell even have an FDA anyway? Just require the company post all their information and get rid of the regulation entirely. I actually think this isn't an unreasonable argument, even if I don't necessarily agree or disagree with it. It certainly seems more reasonable to me than "we should have a regulator that just rubber stamps things."
I'm fine with the FDA taking their time. The problem with risk in decisions is people forget in high stakes high risk decision making, it's about the process. This whole discussion about the FDA taking too long will look a lot different if a year from now the vaccine turns out to have some horrible long term effects (which it could, even though I think it's unlikely, just, you know, 'cause).