As I may have mentioned, I’m taking part in the Oxford vaccine trial. As I predicted at the time, sticking a big stick up your nose and against your tonsils every week for a year is deeply unpleasant, but I am willing to make these sacrifices for the common good.
A few weeks after I had the vaccine, I was asked to come in again. They’d established that a second, booster dose had led to an improved immune response, so they offered one to anyone who wanted it.
(Of course, I may have had the control dose, a meningitis vaccine; if so, I’ll have had it in the booster shot as well. Since it’s double-blind, the doctors and nurses administering wouldn’t know either, but it has to be the same as the first or the whole trial gets buggered up. It feels like a logistical nightmare, but it’s probably got some simple system.)
It’s in the news that the trial has been halted after a participant developed transverse myelitis, an inflammation of the spinal column. So I wanted to write about this, because when I went in to have the booster shot, I also had to sign a whole new consent form. The new form said this: “[O]ne volunteer in the trials of ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 developed neurological symptoms which caused the study to pause while a safety review took place. The volunteer was later diagnosed with an unrelated neurological illness.”
That is, they got everyone on the whole trial — 10,000 in the UK alone — to sign a new consent form, because someone had developed a nerve condition which they already knew had nothing to do with the vaccine.
If you have 10,000 people and follow them for a year, some number of them will get ill. One of the most widely known risks of vaccinations is Guillain-Barré syndrome, which — very rarely — can be triggered by vaccinations. But I think there’s about a one in five chance* you’d see it just by fluke in a randomly selected group of 10,000 people in a year. That would definitely pause the trial, but it’s more likely than rolling a 1 on a D6.
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