In a phase 3 vaccine trial how many persons actually receive the trial vaccine?
Perhaps I am making an incorrect assumption, but when it is reported that 30,000 participants are being inoculated, I take that to mean that about 15,000 are getting the vaccine and about 15,000 are getting a placebo.
But then I see this:
Statisticians have been crunching the numbers to predict how many infections would need to occur in the study population to gauge the vaccine’s effectiveness. To show the Moderna vaccine is 60 percent effective, Fauci said, there would need to be about 150 infections among the 30,000 participants.
WAPO
That leads me to believe that the number of persons being innoculated with the 'real deal' is 30K, meaning that the entire pool, including the control group, is more on the order of 60,000.
Are there 30K volunteers or 60K volunteers?
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The article makes it clear there are a total of 30K participants with 15K receiving placebo:
The vaccination marks a much-anticipated milestone: the official
launch of the first in a series of large U.S. clinical trials that
will each test experimental vaccines in 30,000 participants, half
receiving the shot and half receiving a placebo.
How Fauci comes up with 150 infections to demonstrate a 60% effectiveness, I do not know, but I would expect he knows the details of the statistical analysis being used and what their assumptions are about the odds of becoming infected.
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