I was listening to the radio and they were talking about covid vaccines undergoing trials and depending on the result they do or don’t get approved. How do they tell if it’s good. Do they just use a null hypothesis test? are there other options?
In: Mathematics
A double blind study just means that nobody-not even the people running the experiment- know which patients are getting the actual vaccine. This is meant to eliminate any chance of bias in the data.
In a nutshell what a drug study tries to do is test a drug candidate (like a vaccine) in a group or multiple groups of patients that are representative of the general population. Then you wait to see if a statistically significant fraction of them getting the vaccine/drug do not contract the disease, or meet other markers such as blood antibody levels that indicate the response you’re looking for. These endpoints are all determined ahead of time and are used to judge the efficacy of the experiment.
This is an extremely complex process- drug trials can go on for years and involve thousands of patients before being approved for use.
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