From the bull shit headline, it sounds like the Oxford vaccine has only a 50% chance of working, right? Except that is not at all what this is about.

Because the infection rate and number of infected people is dropping rapidly, it becomes hard to determine if the vaccine gives protection. When doing a vaccine trial, the researchers vaccinate a lot of people and see how many get sick – or not sick. They do not deliberately infect the volunteers to see if the vaccine works.

Because Covid-19 is declining on its own or due to protective measures, they estimate a 50% probability they end up with insufficient DATA to validate the vaccine by September. Completely different interpretation from the bull shit and misleading headline that was intentionally written to make you think this leading vaccine candidate had “only ’50 percent’ success” potential.

“It is a race, yes. But it’s not a race against the other guys. It’s a race against the virus disappearing, and against time,” Professor Hill, 61, told the Telegraph. “But at the moment, there’s a 50 per cent chance that we get no result at all. We’re in the bizarre position of wanting Covid to stay, at least for a little while. But cases are declining.”

….

Sir John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University, during an interview with The Sunday Times reiterated Hill’s concerns, explaining that the speed of development was “entirely dependent” on the number of infections in the population.

Source: UK researchers warn of only ’50 percent’ success for COVID vaccine trial | Fox News

One solution may be to move trials to countries where the pandemic is continuing to spread more widely.

The pandemic’s news reports reinforce that media is basically garbage designed to inflame your emotional response. It’s gloom, doom and fear mongering day in and day out. It is not just Fox News that is worthless bull shit – nearly all of the media has self destructed with this sort of baseless fear mongering that has created a mental health pandemic.