https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.31.21261387v4.full.pdf

little significance in the data between the two group. only difference was one had the vaccine and the other didn't.

I wonder when the longer term safety data will start rolling in.

As someone who used to write and review articles for data-based scientific journals, this one is terrible. It really shouldn't pass the peer-review process without major edits.

With that said, I'm not going to question the validity of the data. We will assume that it's correct. However, reading the article as it's written, I see a few flaws.

1) n is only 699. It's 310 for vaccinated individuals and 389 for unvaccinated. That is a very small sample set.

2) Based on what is written in paragraph 2 under "Main text" they pretty much only tested SYMPTOMATIC vaccinated people.

From that paragraph (emphasis is my own): "Infectious virus was detected in the sole specimen tested from an asymptomatic fully vaccinated individual. Although few asymptomatic individuals were sampled, these results indicate that even asymptomatic, fully vaccinated people might shed infectious virus."

Of course symptomatic people are going to shed virus, vaccinated or not. They are drawing the conclusion that even asymptomatic fully vaccinated people might shed the virus based on ONE data point.

In Figure C, it shows that there were 24 asymptomatic unvaccinated people and 11 asymptomatic vaccinated people. That contradicts the paragraph that I quoted, but it's still a pitifully small sample set. And I think the difference is that the n=1 data point is from the subset that was determined to be infectious. So, only one asymptomatic vaccinated person had enough virus in the sample to be deemed "infectious". All the rest of the "infectious" samples came from symptomatic vaccinated individuals.

133 unvaccinated and 74 vaccinated subjects had "unknown symptom status". To me, that's not acceptable considering how small this sample set is.

They conclude: "Vaccinated and unvaccinated persons should get tested when symptomatic or after close contact with someone with suspected or confirmed COVID-19."

Did it really take 15 PhDs, MDs, and DVMs to reach that conclusion???

Regardless, this article is a great example of why peer review is SO important. Note the disclaimer in the header on every page stating that this has NOT been peer-reviewed.

I'm curious to hear what others who have a background in writing and reviewing peer-reviewed literature have to say about this.

I reviewed the article pretty quickly, so if I missed or misunderstood something, please point it out.