A distinguished group of scientists and experts is circulating a Citizen Petition against the premature granting of full approval of the Covid-19 vaccines. You find the full text here.
In the last few weeks, we learned that both Pfizer and Moderna have already lobbied to have their vaccines fully approved. You may recall that their vaccines were granted emergency use authorization, which as the name suggests, is not full approval. A normal vaccine trial takes roughly two years because we need to assess the long-term benefits and risks of these injections. Time passing is the only way we can measure long-term effects. When the EUAs were granted, the FDA loudly proclaimed there would be no "short cuts", that the trials will continue until their designed end dates. It looks like they were just joking.
This fight is about maintaining the standards of science. It is about stopping bad practices from lingering on after this emergency is over. As you have read on this blog over and over, while the scientific results of the trials and real-world studies have been encouraging, the science has been far from perfect - and in this emergency, people have been willing to look the other way on the flaws of these studies.
The EUA status of the vaccines is not stopping anyone who wants to get vaccinated from getting the shots. A while ago, an argument was made that full approval would encourage employers to make vaccinations a requirement for work. This is a red herring that assumes no vaccine hesitancy among top decision-makers at all employers. People who are hesitant will simply find their way to employers who embrace vaccine hesitancy. We should have learned the lesson from the mask-wearing red herring. Some erroneously believed that if vaccinated people are "rewarded" with not having to wear masks, the vaccine hesitant people would suddenly decide to get innoculated. Polls show that the same people who are vaccine-hesitant are the ones who have been ignoring masking rules all along.
Another argument is that people will trust these vaccines more if they were fully approved, rather than authorized for emergency use. The elephant in this room is that a full approval being granted prematurely is not full approval. Those people who make the distinction between EUA and full approval surely can see through this ruse.
Trust is a precious commodity. Once lost, it's hard to earn back. I agree with the petition. Why is there an urgency to grant full approval?
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To make your voice heard, click here to comment on the petition.
[P.S. The authors of the Citizen Petition has a piece in BMJ explaining their reasoning. See here.
Importantly, they said: "publicly raising any element of hesitation about covid-19 vaccines will be seen by some as irresponsible, stoking unfounded fears in the public’s mind and contributing to the “vaccine hesitancy” problem trumpeted every day. But the alternatives—privately raising concerns or simply remaining silent—are arguably more detrimental to public trust in the long run."
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