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Notes -
February. (For the sake of accuracy; this makes your conclusions stronger, not weaker.)
It's easy to imagine minds legitimately too constrained to think as far outside the box as "human challenge trials"... if only I was sure that was the problem. It would be easier to forgive the use of mindless bureaucratic "we have to follow trial protocol!" to replace thinking if they'd actually mindlessly followed protocol, rather than changing it after the fact to totally-coincidentally delay trial results until after the election. If we could easily change study design after all, post facto with hand-waved justification, it becomes much harder to justify making changes that added delays and let thousands more die instead of changes that removed delays.
I was actually thinking of Pfizer which started trials in April but your point stands - Feb for Moderna. I suppose it was too broad and an oversimplification to talk about 'the vaccine' when there were several.
The delay issue is also very serious, I agree.
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