That's just not how it works. Remember that we are dealing with a small number of patients here. This is not like a huge study with 40,000 patients, where you can notice if there are an unusually high number of deaths in the entire group (placebo AND drug groups), and have the monitoring committee check on whether the patients who died were in the drug group.

We're dealing with a disease that kills a lot of people. You can expect that some people who get Brilacidin, not placebo, are probably going to die anyway. It defeats the purpose of a double-blinded study if people are looking at small numbers of patients and KNOW who got what. The data safety monitoring committee may be taking an interim look, but looking at all the data and figuring out what really happened is not as easy as people think.