For what's worth, Brazilian regulators also had a bunch of issues with data provided for Sputnik. Issues were also raised when facilities were inspected.
Same feeling here. Curiously enough the domain is called "For better science", where we'd have expected neutrality and impartiality to be the guiding principles of any report.
Apart from that, it is hard to believe that any of the vaccine reports and clinical trials are unbiased. Unfortunately there are too many conflicts of interest and money on the table for any information to be taken at face value. The beauty of science is that now that the vaccines are out there it becomes easier to independently access them and move our knowledge further in the right direction.
And on that note, regardless of the final outcome for Sputnik V, at least there will be lessons learned for the future development of vaccines and increased scrutiny in their manufacturing process.
For what it's worth, the blog has a pretty similar tone even when writing about less politically-fraught topics; it's usually focused on fraud in the life science literature.
> at least there will be lessons learned for the future development of vaccines and increased scrutiny in their manufacturing process.
I’m nagging, but we’ve gone to extraordinary lengths to set a precedent where pharmaceutical companies are relieved of the burden of demonstrating the safety of their products and also relieved of the risk of providing relief to anyone harmed by said products.
20 years later, emergency measures to protect Americans from terrorism are in effect today. I doubt Pfizer will be vulnerable to class-action suits ever again.
>The beauty of science is that now that the vaccines are out there it becomes easier to independently access them and move our knowledge further in the right direction.
I mean that groups without any conflict of interest can gather population level data and evaluate for themselves how effective the vaccines are, and how likely it is for the clinical trial data to have been correct.
There is a reason publications and conferences require disclosure of conflicts of interest, and that is because those with a conflict of interest are biased to find positive results (and hide negative results) that align with their financial goals.
>I mean that groups without any conflict of interest can gather population level data and evaluate for themselves how effective the vaccines are,
It won't work because for every such group, there will be 10 groups with high conflict of interest that can counter any finding of your hypothetical group, and journals with conflict of interests will reject the findings of that group, but instead give high visibility to the reports of high-conflict of interest groups..
Quickly no one will dare to research the said topic.
Sounds like the author has an axe to grind.