GroveHillWanderer

No, the people responding to being asked which way they've voted makes it true.

That's what phase 3 trials are designed for. You test the vaccines on tens of thousands of people so that any rare side effects can be discovered. The Janssen phase 3 trial has 60,000 participants and the one from Astra Zeneca has over 50,000.

The State Quarantine Facilities are government-run facilities (mostly on military bases as far as I know) for Thai nationals. Alternative State Quarantine means the government-approved hotels where foreigners stay (or Thais who are willing to pay for them).

The Alternative State Quarantine facilities are hotels.

50% efficacy is just the absolute lowest possible boundary for what might be approved by the FDA. There's every reason to hope (looking at the immune responses from the phase 1 & 2 trials) that some if not several of the candidate vaccines will achieve a much better efficacy rate than that.

Actually, the more I think about this, the more I reckon that Peter Doshi is misrepresenting the situation. Firstly, there no indication I can see, that any of the vaccines will be only 30% effective (the truth is, we just don't know yet) and secondly the FDA guidelines which he actually cites, say that no vaccine will be approved unless it's at least 50% effective. So any vaccine which is only 30% effective (as he baselessly asserts they're designed to be) would never be approved for use.

He actual doesn't say that. He says that three of the trials (those from Moderna, Pfizer and Janssen) are only designed to show a 30% reduction, but what is he basing that on? He says it's because they have to meet FDA guidelines and that's what the FDA requires. I read the FDA document that's referred to. It says the following: As far as I can tell, that only means that the FDA will not approve a vaccine unless it's at least 50% effective (with a confidence interval of >30%). Even if only 50% is required, that doesn't mean it's what the trials are designed

Not well enough, apparently.

Other people have already addressed why they never completed development of a SARS vaccine (basically because it disappeared as a threat so quickly) and your point about MERS is misleading. Very promising efforts are ongoing for a MERS vaccine with the Oxford vaccine development group's candidate vaccine currently undergoing human trials in Saudi Arabia. However it's never received the funding or had the urgency the current coronavirus has because again, it's not that much of a threat, since it kills less than 200 people a year on average, in the entire world. In fact,

Also, at the time Thalidomide was introduced, it did not have to go through much, if any testing because safety standards were much less stringent back then. In fact the whole Thalidomide tragedy is one of the main reasons for the strict drug safety regulations we have nowadays - they were largely developed in the wake of it.

It has been documented since the very early days of this virus that it can be contracted via fomites and can persist on hard surfaces for some time. A recent Australian study found that it can remain viable on objects and surfaces (in ideal conditions) for up to 28 days. Coronavirus can last 28 days on objects

There's nothing on that link that says 12.8 days is the absolute maximum. One paper on there says that data from China shows a mean (average) incubation period from 1.8 to 12.8 days. Also, although the date on that paper itself may be more recent, it's actually a summary of older data, most of which is also from January to March. One of the papers referenced on that link provides exactly the statistic I was talking about, as follows: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32150748/

I'm not sure what quote you're referring to but the idea that Karry Mullis said that PCR could not be used to detect viruses has been fact-checked and shown to be false. See Reuters article below. Inventor of PCR method didn't say it can't be used in virus detection

According to the research, it takes longer than 14 days for the virus to incubate in around 1 in 100 cases. There was one case in China which documented a 27-day incubation period. Coronavirus incubation period I'm not sure that a 1% chance, although admittedly small, qualifies as staggeringly unlikely.

Nobody has ever said that 14 days is the maximum possible incubation period for Covid-19. It's always been recognised that sometimes (about 1 in 100 cases) it takes longer than that to develop. See info below from webmd.com: Assuming that there have been enough cases of Covid-19 in people in quarantine in Thailand (and I know there have been a bunch of them) then it's entirely possible that she represents that 1 in 100 chance. In fact, according to info on the Worldometer site: