I have head that the brief trials on the effectiveness of the Covid Vaccine are going to be stopped for ethical reasons and everyone be given the actual vaccine.

Although a placebo group is the only way to know the effectiveness of a potential vaccine, in light of the current pandemic, this makes sense

 

However, with widespread vaccination going on, I hope the will continue to monitor the percent of people being vaccinated that develop symptoms.  

This could be compared to the percent of people in the general population developing symptoms.  Then we could get updated data on the different vaccines (assuming transparency of actual data) effectiveness.  The current sample sizes and duration of study have huge margins of errors.  

  

Does anybody know if the research study for the approved vaccines will continue and in what fashion they are continuing?

Which particular vaccine you talking about ? There are plenty to choose from. ????

27 minutes ago, brianp0803 said:

I have head that the brief trials on the effectiveness of the Covid Vaccine are going to be stopped for ethical reasons and everyone be given the actual vaccine.

Although a placebo group is the only way to know the effectiveness of a potential vaccine, in light of the current pandemic, this makes sense

Maybe they are just worried now that with high rates of infection,  risking giving a placebo could lead to the receiver actually dying of the disease !

I understand the risk of giving a placebo during the pandemic.  Everyone eligible for the potential vaccine should receive it.  

But, I am hoping they are continuing to collect and process data of the number of people receiving each company's vaccine, and the number of people developing symptoms and testing positive for Covid-19.  

 

I understand the "rush" to get the vaccine out to the public.  But, I hope while being distributed, data is still being collected on each vaccine and analyzed as to its effectiveness.

Yes, for the presently approved (somewhere) vaccines from AstraZeneca, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna trials are still continuing. A (not to clear) overview of the timeline of all trials can be found at  https://vac-lshtm.shinyapps.io/ncov_vaccine_landscape/. However, there is always a problem: normally once vaccination starts the trial is 'unblinded', i.e. participants get informed whether they got a placebo or the vaccine and are then free to still get the vaccine (when available, they are not first in line) if they happened to be in the placebo group https://www.sciencemag.org/ news/2020/12/makers-successful-covid-19-vaccine-wrestle-options-many-thousands-who-received-placebos . Apparently that has not happened yet.

In general there has to be a phase IV trial defined as (definition from National cancer institute): 'A type of clinical trial that studies the side effects caused over time by a new treatment after it has been approved and is on the market. These trials look for side effects that were not seen in earlier trials and may also study how well a new treatment works over a long period of time. Phase IV clinical trials may include thousands of people. Also called phase 4 clinical trial and post-marketing surveillance trial.'