WTF Happened to the BMJ?

>Again, note the juxtaposition. These 477 patients who reported COVID-19 symptoms but never received nasal swabs were across the entire trial of well over 40,000 subjects, but the way it’s phrased, not put into context of the size of the entire trial, makes this sound like a huge number

477 untested patients is absolutely a huge number in the context of this trial: only 170 symptomatic infection were confirmed over the entire trial (the only endpoint). Even if the missed positives were evenly distributed between the two arms of the trial, the relative efficacy would be skewed by the additional cases.

For example, if we assume all of the untested people were actually positive (not unreasonable, they were symptomatic), the reported efficacy would drop by ~30%: instead of 8 confirmed cases in the vax arm vs 162 in the control arm (95.2%), it would become 218 vs. 429 (66.3%). Not a trivial difference.

To sum up: Oh no, the BMJ publishes a wide variety of op-eds and investigative pieces not just by Trusted Sources Like Me, but also by Those Quacks Over There.