Vijay Sikand

As a matter of fact, it got so busy, I had to stop my private practice completely.

I love that question because being a double-blind study, I had no idea whether patients were receiving vaccine or placebo.

And as you can imagine, during the course of those few years where we were blinded, I had patients out of 1,200 coming down with all kinds of things.

whether it's heart attacks, strokes, things that people have in the normal course of their lives when you're adults.

And I always wondered, gosh, I hope the vaccine's not causing it.

But fortunately, we had what's called a data safety monitoring board, independent board, which was not blinded.

So they were able to look at all these things that were happening that were sort of worrying me and other investigators and know whether there was a signal or not that the vaccine was involved.

So fortunately, this data safety monitoring board never called and said, hey, stop the study, which I wondered, gosh, I hope I'm not doing this.

As you can imagine, the very vast amount of data that were accumulated from all the sites around the country had to be collated, analyzed.

sliced and diced by statisticians, run by data safety review boards where they're looking at adverse effects that patients had reported throughout the study to see whether they may or may not have been related to the vaccine.

But patients actually became impatient in a way, no pun intended, because they wanted to know.

And of course, patients, we didn't unblind the study until after it was over.

So patients were wondering, did I get the real thing or not?

And then, of course, it was a game.

There were people who'd say, I know I got the real thing because I felt, mmm, after my arm really ached or I had this achiness the next day or I had this little temperature, so I think I got the real thing.

But it'd be amazing how often they were wrong.

So it prevented roughly 80% of cases of Lyme disease that would have occurred in people who were vaccinated compared to people who weren't.

Being the physician on the ground there in Lyme, Connecticut, my job was to tell these folks from the FDA why we even needed a vaccine for Lyme disease.

It's often difficult to diagnose Lyme.

It may be difficult to treat.