tools for commensality 🧿seems fine:
"Pfizer and BioNTech have decided to halt a large US trial of their updated COVID-19 vaccine in healthy adults aged 50 to 64, after failing to find enough people willing to take part in it"
Johni would +1 on this heartily
mivox is exhausted 
@inquiline WAIT I NEVER EVEN HEARD ABOUT IT
i didn't either. and it seems like there was FDA fuckery that made them exclude a lot of folks
@inquiline Good lord I hate these people SO MUCH.
Katherine WSame. And I would love to have been offered the chance...
Sara@inquiline I'm a bit frustrated that they didn't ask, we would have signed up
did I miss an email or something
aburka 🫣@sarae @inquiline I'm guessing they didn't really try very hard
sport of sacred spherical cowsTrial requirements designed to limit access (unstoppable force) meet societal normalcy bias (immovable object) that had already tanked uptake under the prior regime. (Less than one in five Usian adults got vaccinated in the latest round; half as many Usian children.)
Clearly, if ours were a society with popular investment in ongoing public health measures, any placebo study would be difficult for reason of not being able to find folk willing to risk not being given the vaccine.
Of course, we've now had six years to develop or import any of dozens of inactivated virus (19th century tech) or subunit (1980s tech) vaccines, yet thus far only one of the latter has entered the Usian market, and has been challenging to access even in a major metropolitan area like NYC.
1/2
Granted, even inactivated virus vaccines would likely have met as much resistance from the present regime (if only due to country of origin of those that were developed), but the anti-novelty position would at least be harder to defend for 19th century tech.
That all said, given that, as of August 2024, three in ten people globally had yet to receive even a first dose of any covid vaccine (less than two thirds globally have completed an initial protocol), and the ultimate effectiveness of vaccines is a matter of uptake among the entire human population, trials being cancelled for a booster, six years into this, that again near all of those eligible wouldn't even have taken, seems a rather parochial concern.
2/2
fortunately here is where i complain about parochial concerns. i would prefer to have vax access for high-risk people i know who still get vaxxed 2x/yr, all the other considerations also being what they are
As a high-risk person in the age range of the trial who has myself been getting twice annual boosters, who likewise hopes to continue to do so, am still gonna be plain about my privilege (and the perquisitive classposture privilege of those like me, our risk level being measured against a baseline of having had vaccine access at all), for even having the option to worry about losing that perk.