As I've mentioned this morning in the Politics thread, of the 34 Tory MPs who voted against the Government in the conservative rebellion on lockdown recently, 30 of them voted leave in the 2016 EU Referendum.
This is where `science by press release' causes problems. The Oxford group had discussed the situation with the regulators as soon as the mistake was discovered. The regulators told them to continue the trial and report the results. They reported the data in a preliminary publication in the Lancet journal, a paper full of data and I don't see a combined % there. A press release said: `Preliminary data indicate that the vaccine is 70.4% effective, with tests on two different dose regimens showing that the vaccine was 90% effective if administered at a half dose and then at a full dose, or 62% effective if administered in two full doses.' I guess somebody thought (wrongly) that it was helpful to give the combined %.Tripps wrote: ↑26 Nov 2020, 16:08 I think the gilt is starting to come off the Astrazenica vaccine gingerbread. Looks like the 'half dose was a mistake, which they then incorporated into the trial. Worrying that no one over 55 got the half dose - so they did split the group by age then? I read somewhere that the US authorities are unlikely to approve it.
As for the claim `that none of the people in the low-dose group were over 55 years old' that information is not yet in the public domain, as far as I can tell. The American may have insider information - he's in charge of the vaccine work in the US. We have to keep in mind that all this is just interim results, the trial is still underway and is modified to find out more about the value of a low initial dose.