I've been hearing and thinking more about the Pfizer mRNA vaccine this morning. It does seem like this signal is likely to be real (there's not enough data in the news release to know, but most credible back calculations suggest that the efficacy signal is real). So I've been

trying to think what bothers me about it. And it's the ways that the culture of interim analyses seems to be shifting. Instead of the clear boundaries keeping the businesspeople from interfering with trials while they're being run, we're now seeing premature breaking of

that confidentiality for reasons that aren't entirely clear to me. I would hate for one of the legacies of the COVID pandemic to be that pharma gets to break the protections of interim analyses in order to beat their competitors in competition or sway the public. I can't wait

for an effective and safe vaccine and am hopeful that the Pfizer drug will be one. I don't want us to (rightly) lose faith in clinical trial methods and the rigor we've used for decades to get real answers before widespread circulation of powerful compounds.