Or, alternatively, did Oxford really find a pharmaceutical company so incompetent that they did this by mistake, on top of giving an entire trial segment the wrong dose of vaccine the first time around? These are some rather epic screwups.
My experience working for a large company makes me not particularly surprised by this and I would give a decent amount of probability to this being an accident. I don’t know enough about the specific procedures to be hugely confident but it does seem most likely to me.
If we’re fairly confident that the wrong dose thing was an accident—I can’t think of any reason to do this deliberately and then try to cover it up—then AstraZeneca obviously have the potential to make big mistakes.
One scenario would be that the person requesting / approving the press release is not the same as the person running the project but rather their boss or their bosses boss or even in another department. The press release approver is less involved in the minutiae and has remembered the 79% figure, maybe even goes so far as to check their e-mails that this is the correct figure (or check with someone else who checks their e-mails). Probably none of these people were in the meeting with the safety board.
I have had this experience myself on many occasions where my superiors have given information to customers that is outdated just from them not being as up to date or forgetting the latest results. Obviously I’d like to think something like this would have more care taken about it but the dosing debacle is suggestive that checking things isn’t AstraZeneca’s strong suit.
That combined with the 0% chance of this not being noticed suggests to me that this wasn’t on purpose.
My experience working for a large company makes me not particularly surprised by this and I would give a decent amount of probability to this being an accident. I don’t know enough about the specific procedures to be hugely confident but it does seem most likely to me.
If we’re fairly confident that the wrong dose thing was an accident—I can’t think of any reason to do this deliberately and then try to cover it up—then AstraZeneca obviously have the potential to make big mistakes.
One scenario would be that the person requesting / approving the press release is not the same as the person running the project but rather their boss or their bosses boss or even in another department. The press release approver is less involved in the minutiae and has remembered the 79% figure, maybe even goes so far as to check their e-mails that this is the correct figure (or check with someone else who checks their e-mails). Probably none of these people were in the meeting with the safety board.
I have had this experience myself on many occasions where my superiors have given information to customers that is outdated just from them not being as up to date or forgetting the latest results. Obviously I’d like to think something like this would have more care taken about it but the dosing debacle is suggestive that checking things isn’t AstraZeneca’s strong suit.
That combined with the 0% chance of this not being noticed suggests to me that this wasn’t on purpose.