Replicating science

I have a new paper that just came out (link), coauthored with Peter Doshi, Mark Jones and Linda Wastila, entitled "Transparency of clinical trials: reproducing and extending analyses".This paper stems from some work we did to make use of the release of many thousand documents from Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine trial. This release was made possible by a FOIA request, made in the public interest since the vaccines were subsidized by a lot of public funds.The trove of documents was vast but disorganized. Our primary goal is to replicate the results published in Thomas, et. al, a key document upon which the vaccine's emergency approval was based (link). A secondary goal is to perform further analyses using the released datasets to answer additional questions.We fished out the datasets and SAS codes used to generate the tables and charts in Thomas, et. al. We picked out several key effectiveness and safety outcomes tables, annotated the SAS codes, and were able to reproduce almost all of the…