Astra Zeneca could not ensure that it dosed people correctly in their trials. This is clown school stuff. The head of the Oxford team described textbook p-hacking at a press conference and admitted they were doing it, saying essentially that it didn't matter if some datasets showed that the vaccine didn't work so long as some subsets of data did. Given this, ANY papers from this group are highly suspect. This isn't quite as extreme as what Didier Raoult stuff, but it's basically the same thing, just less extreme and slightly more sophisticated.

This same team has claimed to have vaccines for multiple viral diseases in the past including for example Chikungunya. None of their studies could be replicated. It's not in the popular psyche in the US because these are not diseases that affect people in the West, but finding supposed cures for them are great for getting grants. Nothing they have done has actually been found to work in the fullness of time. It's not like it sort of worked but not well enough to be statistically significant or that it had some low incidence side-effect. The stuff they came up with was mostly indistinguishable from placebo in trials run by third parties.

They have made crazy claims about their Covid research since March 2020 while serious scientists who have produced stuff that actually works were more focused on stuff in the lab. They continue to make outlandish claims, for example claiming they had developed the first ever monoclonal antibody drug for Covid. This was in the weeks after Trump and ex NJ Gov Christie were successfully treated with Regeneron's and Eli Lilly's monoclonal antibody drugs respectively, and of course the British press and Oxford boosters spread it around in the media.

The "studies" that were published that show "efficacy" had vanishingly few over 65s in the treated population but had over 65s in the control. If you look at it carefully, it's not clear the claimed efficacy is much more than a difference in population characteristics. Their apologists claim they performed worse than Pfizer/Moderna because it's possible the treated took more risks because they had symptoms from the vaccine and so knew they were immune. The only problem with this claim is that the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines caused more flu-like symptoms.

This is pure conjecture, but I suspect the UK and EU approvals have more to do with Brexit politics than actual science. It also has to do with the fact that the head of the Oxford team is from the "right" family background. Unlike the US, this sort of thing matters a lot in the EU, even the UK. The UK government is looking good but the reduction in UK deaths is only partially real. More than half the decrease in Covid deaths in the UK is fake because excess deaths went up simultaneously with a decrease Covid deaths. Of course the EU doesn't want to look bad post Brexit so they had to approve and show they were vaccinating their population just as quickly as the UK was. Despite the EU approval, Poland, Germany and France are taking steps to limit the usage of this vaccine in their countries. I wouldn't be surprised if more European countries do so as well.

I for one sincerely hope the Astra Zeneca vaccine is NOT approved by the FDA. Would you rather have a real vaccine or pretend to have been vaccinated and get infected later? Even if the Astra Zeneca vaccine has the claimed 70% efficacy (it doesn't against the new strains), and if R0 is >5 as it is for the new South African and UK variants, it will only slow, not stop the epidemic.

Meanwhile, the US is doubling the number of people vaccinated per day every two weeks, and this is with vaccines that incontrovertibly work about as well a any vaccine in history. Exponential growth is bad when it's an epidemic but it's very, very good when it's a startup or the scaling up of a treatment. Resources are always limited. I'd much rather spend them on getting more Pfizer and Moderna vaccines into people's arms than waste time, energy and resources on something that isn't a solution even in the best possible scenario.

The JNJ and Novavax vaccines are looking just as good and are much easier to manufacture and distribute. The top line numbers are a bit worse only because their treated population was different and more challenging to get an immune response out of and infected with the strain the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines were tested on plus many people who had the new strains. The Astra Zeneca vaccine looks like a candidate for countries where a cold logistics chain is hard but it really isn't. It adds the spike protein to an adenovirus. Adenovirus infections generally don't cause many symptoms but after one or two infections you are immune. If you are immune to adenoviruses, your immune system is likely to take out the vaccine before it has the chance to train your immune system to go after the spike protein. The problem here is that adenovirus infections are far more common in areas where cold logistics chains are difficult.

I can't say this will cause Thalidomide like side effects but I would happily take a bet at 10-1 odds that within 5 years, data will come to light that shows serious problems with either the safety of efficacy of the Astra Zeneca vaccine. That implies that I think the chances there are problems are >10%, which is much too high for approval given the IFR of Covid.