Transparency of COVID-19 vaccine trials: decisions without data

Summary box Access to data for drugs and vaccines has historically been fairly limited to journal article publications and hard-to-access and difficult to read regulatory reports.1 But the past decade has witnessed strides in clinical trial data transparency. A wide range of institutions, from pharmaceutical companies, government agencies, trade organisations, journals and not-for-profit organisations, have all acknowledged the importance of data sharing, including the release of deidentified individual participant data. Many policies, regulations and platforms now exist to facilitate data access, including landmark transparency policies from the European Medicines Agency (EMA)2 3 and Health Canada.4 Both regulators now post on their websites, sections of the licensure dossier received by the industry (https://clinicaldata.ema.europa.eu/ and https://clinical-information.canada.ca/). There are also industry and academic platforms to facilitate third-party access to trial data and documents, including ClinicalStudyDataRequest.com, Yale University Open Data Access (YODA) Project and Vivli.5 In 2013, the US and European industry trade organisations endorsed a joint statement on clinical trial data sharing, making a series of commitments that ‘recognise the importance of sharing clinical trial data in the …