The first human trial in Europe of a coronavirus vaccine has begun in Oxford
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
> If you participate in the study until the end, you will receive a total payment of between £190-625, dependent on group.
My housemate hoped to take part but was not selected.
Very broadly speaking, the adaptive immune system has two arms.
One arm, humoral immunity, is about detecting foreign substances in the spaces outside cells: B-cells make antibodies, antibodies inspect molecules floating around, a match triggers the B-cells to proliferate and make more antibodies, and then antibodies tell macrophages and various other brutal cells to destroy and eat everything in sight, resulting in inflammation, but hopefully killing the invader.
The other arm, cellular immunity, is about detecting foreign proteins inside cells: T-cells make T-cell receptors, T-cell receptors inspect peptides presented on the surface of cells through some amazing machinery culminating in the MHC I protein, a match triggers the T-cells to proliferate, and the T-cells themselves go round triggering self-destruction of cells presenting the foreign peptides.
(I'm leaving out MHC II and helper T cells here, let alone T-regulatory cells, gamma delta T cells and all sorts of other things i don't know about)
Both wings are useful in response to a viral infection, but ultimately, the cellular immunity is key. Viruses commandeer and replicate inside cells, so to stop an infection, you need to find and kill those cells. Cellular immunity does that.
Vaccines based on injecting proteins or dead viruses can only develop humoral immunity. Vaccines based on modified viruses, like this one, can also develop cellular immunity.
In theory. So far, there are no T-cell vaccines.
Pretty sure that would never make it past an IRB review.
One reason to have the lockdowns.
I shudder at the thought of a government locking people up because a treatment might, at some point in the future, be found.
It is of course besides the point but I find it extremely optimistic to expect that a treatment can be found that will significantly reduce deaths when deaths mostly occur in patients of very advanced age or with significant underlying conditions.
Participating in a trial like this could save many more lives than donating a kidney. And, if you live in e.g. NYC, there's a decent chance you're going to get COVID anyway, trial or no.
Separately from that... y'know, there are currently lots of health care workers taking care of COVID patients—frequently without proper PPE—and getting sick from it. If we as a society have agreed this is worth the risk, why not a challenge trial to develop a vaccine?
I'm honestly a little surprised there's even a debate about this. The choice seems pretty clear to me.
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[1] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/4/9/21209593/coronav...
However, you can still get similar information by just dropping the control arm in this trial. Give a bunch of people the vaccine and exposed them to the virus. Sure it's not as good as having an untreated control arm, but you're also reducing the risk of someone in the control group dying.
In addition, the mechanism of vaccines is very well know. You can vaccinate and measure antibody formation.
You could still develop a vaccine without a control and have confidence that it works.
Source: I once participated in a phase III open-label single-arm trial.
The standard is two well controlled studies, but additional open label trials may be used to address specific health authority concerns.
If you are interested, you can look up the other trials the drug may have gone through.
I haven't seen the Vox article, but if that's what they said, it's total bullshit and irresponsible journalism, and I'd request that you do your part by not repeating that.
The first kidney donation was in 1954. We have 66 years worth of data--plenty of time for many kidney donors to live out their lives and have the problems caused by kidney donation, so we have a pretty good idea of what the long-term effects of kidney donation are.
We don't know what the long-term effects of coronavirus are because nobody has had it and then lived long term. The first case we know of was in November 2019--five months ago. Vox can't say that "if you're young, the risk of death is about equal to a kidney donation", because we do not know what the risks are. If scientists infected a bunch of 20 year olds with Covid in 2020 and by 2050, 40% of them die of lung cancer before the age of 50, is that something you'd be cool with? Because that might be reality--it's impossible to know.
To be clear, I'm not saying Covid-19 causes lung cancer. I'm saying we cannot possibly know ANYTHING about the long term effect of Covid-19. We shouldn't assume that it causes lung cancer, but we also shouldn't assume it's no more dangerous than a kidney donation. We shouldn't assume, period. So statements like, "if you're young, the risk of death is about equal to a kidney donation" are lies. And I would implore you to not spread that misinformation because it potentially has deadly consequences.
> If scientists infected a bunch of 20 year olds with Covid in 2020 and by 2050, 40% of them die of lung cancer before the age of 50, is that something you'd be cool with?
If it saves the lives of a bunch of nurses in the process? I don't know—I think I'm cool with a possibility of it, yes. Especially when those same people could also catch the virus naturally.
Also, I edited my original post to add a link to the Vox article. It's quite a bit longer / more expansive, and worth a read.
I had gone through my post and removed all the places where I called it "lies" because I intended to say that this arose from ignorance rather than malice, albeit irresponsible ignorance from journalists whose responsibility it is to share information. I must have missed that one, my apologies for the accusation.
> We don't know the long-term effects of 5G either.
Geez, did you get this from Vox too? The bands used for 5G didn't just spring into existence: they've been around and used[1], albeit deployed on much smaller scales than 5G will be. We have long-term data on the effects of adjacent bands, and a few different ways of modeling how electromagnetic radiation affects the body. The data we have is certainly from much smaller deployments than 5G will be, so it's true we don't know all the long-term effects of 5G, but we at least have enough data to put some bounds on how horribly 5G could go wrong. For starters, we know that it doesn't have a 40% chance of killing everyone exposed to it in the next 30 years with lung cancer, because an effect that large would show up even in the more limited data we already have. And if it does turn out to cause some problem with even a minute fraction of that severity, we can turn off the 5G and stop the cause of the problem.
We don't even have a clear lock on the short term mortality rate of coronavirus and we can't stop the spread with the flip of a switch. Where, exactly, is your confidence coming from here?
> If it saves the lives of a bunch of nurses in the process? I don't know—I think I'm cool with a possibility of it, yes.
> Especially when those same people could also catch the virus naturally.
The worst-hit place in the US is NYC, with 141,754 confirmed cases currently. Even if we assume unconfirmed cases 5 times that, we're still talking single-digit percentages of the population infected. And cases are going down. So yes, people could catch the virus naturally, or, as is much more likely, they could not catch the virus, if we continue taking the recommended measures that are working.
Certainly populations like health workers working directly with the infected are at much higher risk than the general population, but there's still a very significant chance they don't get infected. And even if the chance of them not getting infected were negligible, the solution would be to give them proper PPE, training, and other protections, not to say, "Hey you're probably going to get it any way, so let's just deliberately infect you to test vaccines that may not work."
Wasn't you point just that we shouldn't assume? I know that there are models looking at a possibility for only 1% of cases being confirmed. That's been in Sweden and not NYC, but just throwing a 5 out there doesn't make a lot of sense.
It's true that 5 was just a number out of a hat, but I think you'd have a hard time picking a big enough number that it invalidates my point. Even if you pick 100 as you're claiming, you're still looking at a double-digit percentage chance of not getting infected, which you're taking away from people by deliberately infecting them.
Incidentally, saying "If we assume" is different from saying "We can assume". I'm not assuming that number, I'm merely highlighting it as one of the many possibilities.
Based on the number of people testing positive for the antibodies ([0] something like ~21% of random tests in New York), and given that the average estimated R0 is really high, I think ~100% of people being infected by this time next year is a pretty reasonable assumption. This also indicates that the death rate we previously estimated is much lower in reality. Infecting a few more young, healthy people and supervising their health seems a pretty good deal for the world at large.
[0] https://www.livescience.com/covid-antibody-test-results-new-...
There are actually steps we can take to speed this up without abandoning medical ethics. It certainly makes sense to have the first human trials be on medical workers, because it has the highest chance of producing benefit for them, and the results will be clearer in populations with a higher infection rate.
But we're not talking about those because you guys would rather talk about injecting people with coronavirus based on a poor understanding of both risk and medical ethics.
> You cannot tell me what effect 5G will have on the body in 50 years, because no one has tested it. Who knows what might happen?
And y'know what? Technically speaking, he or she is absolutely right: despite our best modelling, we can't really know what deploying 5G at this scale will do in 50 years, and we won't know until 50 years from now! All we can say is, this are what we've extrapolated from the models we have.
Is there specific evidence to suggest that COVID-19 will cause extremely high rates of lung cancer in 30 years? If not, we're just in the messy realm of "anything could happen," which is both true and not particularly useful.
I think you have to compare the (very real!) risks of a challenge trial with the risks of not doing a challenge trial. Maybe it does only speed up development by two months, and the number of health care workers and other members of the public who will die in that time is low enough to not be worth risking the lives of study participants. But that is a question we need to actually look at and consider!
Perhaps not "extremely high", but there are lots of other cases where viruses attacking human tissue much less severely are known to cause cancer. HSV causing cervical cancer is probably the most obvious example, but there are many others.
This is well outside my area of expertise, but what I've read leads me to believe that the way viruses reproduce is particularly prone to resulting in mutations in the human cells it attacks.
It would surprise me a bit if Covid19 didn't increase the chance of cancer at some level, although it might be a very small effect.
> I think you have to compare the (very real!) risks of a challenge trial with the risks of not doing a challenge trial. Maybe it does only speed up development by two months, and the number of health care workers and other members of the public who will die in that time is low enough to not be worth risking the lives of study participants. But that is a question we need to actually look at and consider!
That's true. No questions should ever be off the table.
But it didn't sound much like asking a question when you said upthread, "I'm honestly a little surprised there's even a debate about this. The choice seems pretty clear to me." That's why I responded the way I did.
I didn't mean to imply a cost-benefit analysis shouldn't be done.
That said, I feel like your points are a bit overstated. We now have 66 years worth of Kidney transplant data to show it's safe for both parties, but a lot of people needed to participate in what was a new, risk, experimental surgery to get us to this point.
At some point people have to be willing to take a little bit of risk to get data that could save untold lives and relieve unquantifiable suffering.
Additionally, if COVID-19 does indeed have some horrible long term effect, the cost us having less data or less valuable data now will have a much larger consequence than could ever be suffered by these volunteers.
Uh, technically that's true, but the risks are not the same. The first successful kidney removal (nephrectomy) was in 1869. It wasn't for a donation, it was for a woman suffering an uncloseable fistula which, without the operation, would have killed her. So what exactly was she risking? By the time someone was allowed to volunteer to donate a kidney in 1954, nephrectomy had the better part of a century's worth of data and refinement of technique.
Compare this to the risk you're proposing: With current measures which seem to be working, there's a good chance that most people don't get infected. So you're proposing that healthy individuals who would likely not contract the virus, be intentionally infected with a disease which he only have an approximate mortality rate for, and that we have no idea of the long-term effects of.
Surely you can see how the first risk fits withing "First, do no harm", while the risk you're proposing simply doesn't.
If the vaccine works then we'll all be dying of lung cancer in 30 years.
If it's obvious then it should be equally obvious that a comparison with something that has long term knowledge is nonsensical.
2. It's apparently not obvious, because people on this thread seem to not have thought of it, and when I pointed it out, they've argued vehemently against it.
One of the issues with vaccine development is that vaccines can result in worse infections [1].
If the issue was just “this might not work, but it won’t cause any harm”. You would obviously give this to healthcare workers immediately. But that does not appear to be the case.
So... a challenge trial at phase III will still have risks. Right now, I don’t think we have any vaccines ready to enter phase III?
COVID19 does seem to be actively spreading in the population currently. So I don’t think there would be an issue finding participants for a phase III trial.
At the point that we’re ready for phase III trials. If there is no population where COVID19 is actively spreading, perhaps challenge trials could be considered?
I realize for many that won't be an option. But with the way things are going in America right now, I'm afraid it might not be an option for anyone; it may be a requirement just to get a job or go to school. That frightens me.
That was approved in Europe but not the US.
1 in 55000 people who took pandemrix got narcolepsy.
The risk is small, but the outcome is a severe debilitating illness that requires constant care for the rest of their life.
We may decide that risk is acceptable, but we need to know about it.
It's just vaccinate then let them do normal UK life.
It's different from a phase 1 study when you are testing on healthy volounteers. This would mean deliberately infecting people with a largely unknown virus after vaccination with a vaccine whose efficacy is still not yet determined fully (in fact, it would be to determine its efficacy).
There needs to be a reasonable amount of risk taken in research, otherwise we will find it impossible to make progress.
If you ask under-40y/o non-violent offenders with >10yr sentence and say a $10k payout and guaranteed presidential pardon upon completion of the trial I’m sure there would be some takers.
Yes that’s crazy and I do know the governments history of shady vaccine testing, but we are facing a pandemic and each day sooner that we have a vaccine will be many lives saved.
the highest-profile prison experiments in the US were Project MKUltra, in which prisoners were injected with high doses of LSD, the Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study, and some experiments with radioactive isotopes.
offering prisoners their freedom in exchange for participating in dangerous or harmful trials was widely viewed as coercive, and contrary to the Nuremberg code of medical voluntary consent established after the horrors of Nazi experimentation.
why should it be better to use prisoners than young, healthy volunteers? are their lives cheaper and expendible because they committed non-violent offenses? no IRB would sign off on that, and if you're bypassing IRBs anyway just use young people who think they're invincible..
The Australian army tested anti-malarials with good intent and caused huge mental harms (they are pretty psychologically active and can trigger suicide ideation)
The US army has form for testing on recruits without adequate consent or information
Overall, the whole "for the good of humanity" story here is that the consent is weak, the support is weak, the costs are not borne equally. I would not advise any young person to be guilt-tripped into volunteering for this.
The track record here is very poor
You are simply ignoring the responsibility of the vaccine maker of potentially not going through the adequate steps.
A better equivalence would be the question, how should your hypothetical army be equipped and trained. And would the people doing/deciding that be responsible for the choices made. I would understand you saying, it doesn't matter we are under attack.
Agreed. And if standard training takes 12 months and you're being invaded now, what do you do?
We are allowing "essential" workers to be exposed to COVID. Who could be more of an essential worker than a vaccine trial participant right now?
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12725690/
Just about the last people you’d want to risk that kind of vaccine trial on are healthcare workers, who are already in short supply.
I said that there’s plenty of incidental exposure already: healthcare workers, yes, but also nearly everyone who’s leaving the home too. It is literally a pandemic!
This point is actually made in the article itself: they want to get it done while and where there’s community transmission to avoid the ethical fraught ness of a challenge trial.
For similar reasons, challenge trials also weren’t done for AIDS PrEP, since there were groups with enough lifestyle exposure to power a study.
[1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.17.046375v1
Also - this would be less risky than going to space.
My instinct says >50% of soldiers between 20-30 would instantly volunteer for this. Probably much higher, like 80%. Especially those unmarried.
There would be no lack of fit volunteers.
Its ethically problematic obviously, but so is asking grocery store workers to stock shelves as 'essential workers' during a pandemic when they have no PPE.
I think probably there's a 100% chance that so-called 'essential workers' who are not medical staff will die from Coronavirus due to the pandemic.
The rate of death among the 'very young' is exceedingly low, and I think there were always complications.
If we can narrow it to 19-26 year old, super healthy, without complications ... I think the 'possibility of harm' would be quite low.
It's not beyond the realm of ethical consideration.
Now - remove some ethnical barriers - such as what drug companies used to do by testing drugs in Africa, or what authoritarian governments do all the time (aka China) and you'll have this done in a heartbeat.
I think China/CCP wouldn't think twice about trying this on young men in jail. Is my cynical take.
If the Oxford researchers made trials on Syrian kids in a refugee camp, in exchange for $100, I suppose more people would see a problem here.
I find the attitude puzzling that people are willing to value vague abstractions like "integrity of the community" over thousands of lives.
The reason for the vaccine research protocol we're settled on, is the ubiquity of wanna-be Pasteurs, and dearth of the real ones.
On a separate note. We have deprived ourselves of basic human rights under the premise, that lives are worth any economic outcome of shut down. Where I live, premeditated spreading of the Covid is considered by law an act of terrorism. Officially vetted challenge trials just don't add up.
As of April 20 2020, there were 5 in clinical evaluation and 71 in preclinical evaluation. I'm a layperson, but very interesting to see the different techniques and testing methodologies used.
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/04/22/world/europe/22re...
Given how politicized this has gotten, in general for treatment of this virus, I'm not optimistic that we'll be sharing information. Praying I'm wrong.
The New York Times article discusses vaccine trials that have been approved, or which are planned pending regulatory approval, in Germany, China and the US. If a vaccine in the German trial has already been administered to patients, then the claim in the BBC article about the Oxford trial being the first to inject patients in Europe would be incorrect, but the New York Times article doesn't state whether or not patients have been injected in the German trial — it only states that the trial has been given the 'green-light', and that it 'will be initially conducted on 200 healthy people'.
Another comment here contains a link to an article discussing a World Health Organisation trial, in which the first patient will be Norwegian. That trial will test non-vaccine treatments (specifically hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir, lopinavir and interferon-β 1a), and at the time of publication, the participants had not yet received treatment.
It doesn't seem to me that any of the statements in these articles are in conflict with the BBC piece.
The author of the BBC article is Fergus Walsh; he's a senior medical correspondent for the BBC who will be familiar to anyone who has been watching UK television news during the pandemic. He is one of the most measured and scientifically literate voices on the BBC, and he is not prone to sensationalism or exaggeration. Anything he has written for the BBC's website is very likely to have been worded carefully, and to be reliably-sourced and well-researched, but if there are any errors, either he or the BBC should be contacted so the piece can be corrected. The BBC publishes corrections at https://www.bbc.co.uk/helpandfeedback/corrections_clarificat...
I have no connection to Walsh or the BBC, but I thought this should be noted.
As with wars on your own soil, people forget fast. In Asia my HK colleagues got stressed in january as they did see this before and they (the people without the gov) already automatically took more care.
If this occurs ‘soonish’, I think a lot of people and countries will act differently; I know I will. I was still travelling as, silly me, trusted my gov to warn me; big mistake. I would have wanted to self isolate a month earlier to make sure; next time that will happen. I hope there will not be a next time.
Obviously the issue is, as with everything that relates to the effectiveness of education on most people, how to teach future generations to not be so lax. I am not sure how that would work. It does not work generally or with a massive delay; exactly like the parent trying to save the child from making the same mistakes as she did but the child having the need not to listen (old people, what do they know he, world changed and such!) and experience all the crap themselves instead.
I think, even with a far worse virus, if all countries would’ve shut all borders with china and self quarantined immediately begin january, nothing would happen. Just everyone, every gov and person, thinks and many keep thinking it is all blah and nothing will happen to them. Apparently only the firsthand experience of ‘something bad’ (like Boris Johnson) will actually give them perspective. I think this prepared us well for a worse virus for the coming 20 years; however I think after that, it is will drop off and you will be right; most people will be screwed.
That's not really true. 1957 "Asian Flu" resulted in > 1 million deaths, and 1968 "Hong Kong Flu" resulted ~1 million deaths. Difficult to compare viruses directly, but I would say those were in the vicinity of something like covid-19, which has not yet resulted in even 200k deaths, but certainly had the potential to kill millions of people. (and may yet...)
But until this latest pandemic arose he hadn't even mentioned his experience, it was just considered part of life. And unless you know to look for it, it's barely mentioned in modern history.
It's almost certainly resulted in a larger number than that already.
Estimating the true number of people who have already died of COVID-19 is difficult.
I've seen estimates ranging from 15% more to 4x more than the "confirmed" figure, which itself has increased from 100,000 to ~190,000 over the last 2 weeks.
That's the number of "confirmed" deaths, by some meaning of confirmed. Some of the contributing figures only counting people in hospital at the time of death, and even that with a significant time delay.
I have to wonder if Covid-19 is in the 'sweet spot' of dangerousness, as it has a mortality rate that doesn't hamper its ability to spread but still kills a lot of people.
Now imagine if such a virus was airborne and was already spreading... Who'd know?
Only if all other parameters remain the same. There could be much worse viruses than SARS-Cov-2 (e.g. that are similar in eventual mortality but have symptoms lag behind start of shedding even more). A virus could be just as species-ending as a large rock hitting the earth, they are just both very unlikely or else we wouldn't be here.
A handful of patients (2?) have undetectable viral loads after being treated for leukemia. In these cases, the bone marrow or stem cells were from donors with a mutation in CCR5 that confers some resistance to HIV. The mechanism isn't completely understood, AFAIK, since people with the CCR5 delta32 mutation have partial, but not complete, resistance to HIV normally.
It's not a very viable treatment yet: the transplant procedure is brutal (a friend went through it) and you need to be unlucky enough to need a transplant, yet lucky enough to find a donor that has the right mutations (which again, are not completely known) AND is otherwise compatible with the patient.
Still, very exciting for a possible mechanism, but also probably not coming to a hospital near you this decade.
Here's one of the studies: https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa0802905
Multiple different vaccines could (and probably will) be discovered. These may have different mechanisms and tradeoffs and those too will be taken into account when scaling up to population.
Now who owns what, who gets it first, and who gets paid and in what way, those are thorny issues that have not yet been worked out.
Likely all of them would be developed anyway as some might end up failing (either during testing or during mfr) and I imagine demand is going to be high.
Vaccination on large scale will likely require tens of millions of doses, if not more (and let's not forget you may need more than one inoculation).
That wouldn’t even be enough to vaccinate a mid sized EU country.
The economic benefits to distributing a vaccine quickly would be huge, but I haven't heard world leaders talking about how to do it--they're still on the last war. Luckily, Bill Gates is spending on it, but this needs way more attention because this is our chance to be ahead of the virus for once.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/04/bill-gates-7-potentia...
This is a government funded university project, so "losing the race" is likely not a primary concern; I'm sure if someone else came out with a magic vaccine fully tested and ready to mass manufacture tomorrow the researchers on this project would be pretty happy about that.
The short answer is that there is a bunch of different types of vaccines, and each type has different constraints on their production. Someone who makes an mRNA vaccine isn't going to be able to easily switch to making a live attenuated vaccine instead, for example. Also, first does not necessarily mean best: again, with so many approaches, a vaccine using a different approach can have wildly different side-effects and risk factors. So being second (or even, say, tenth) isn't necessarily a loss.
That said, there are so many projects pushing forward that many of them are bound to fail early. Given the history of cooperation already in this crisis, some of those companies who find their coronavirus vaccine efforts going up in smoke may well choose to help scale out other, more successful efforts--or instead help by taking on more of the current vaccine production efforts, as polio and the flu aren't going away just because coronavirus is here.
'The vaccine could come from anywhere. We've got a domestic vaccine discovery programme in the UK which is being supported, absolutely, as fast as we can go, but the vaccine can come from anywhere. GSK and Sanofi have announced they're doing a vaccine together, which is fantastic news. Most of the big companies are doing vaccines. This is going to come from somewhere, we just need to back lots of horses at the moment, and to make sure we're in a great position to access a vaccine when it occurs. And that's why organisations like CEPI are so important as well; to make sure that the world sees this as a way to get a vaccine, and we all need to be part of the same approach to trying to get as many vaccines as we can. And we may need more than one vaccine.'
Link to the press conference: https://youtu.be/jWOCpmjdHiw?t=1430
Some other comments have referred to the Gates Foundation's contribution to developing vaccines; the foundation's involvement in establishing CEPI (the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations), which Vallance referred to, is a significant part of this.
https://pointless-letters.tumblr.com/ is probably the closest modern substitute.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3335060/ https://jvi.asm.org/content/85/23/12201 https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23563-threatwatch-cou...
Source [German News]: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/gesundheit/coronavirus-impfstoff...
Main source [PEI, English]: https://www.pei.de/EN/newsroom/press-releases/year/2020/08-f...
[1] a federal institute for vaccines
But I've never seen a good documentary on how vaccines are made for diseases today. YouTube just seems to be filled with professor's lectures from introclasses. Are live viruses used and, if so, how are they made inert yet cause the immune system to generate the same antibodies?
Anyone have a documentary with the technical details of any of the modern vaccine generation techniques?
But basically it's more complicated than the usual "attenuated live virus/dead virus".
Tou can have synthetic vaccines, targeting different parts of the virus. Also there are several ways of attenuating pathogens (look up the bcg vaccine for one interesting example)
Doesn't answer your question but hints at the complexity.
Is the long time to create vaccines not usually to make sure they are safe? What is different now that it can be done quicker? Is it just the sheer amount of effort and cash being thrown at it?
[1] https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/04/23/a-...
Just to clarify; the ChAdOx1 MERS prospect hasn't proceeded to a trial demonstrating efficacy in human subjects (as yet).
That's a particularly important distinction here, given the nature of the novel delivery mechanism[1] and prior observation of complications in SARS-CoV-1 vaccine development[2]
Looks like it has (for SARS-CoV-2 instead): https://www.genengnews.com/news/astrazeneca-joins-u-of-oxfor...
The NIH started phasing chimp research out in 2013 and USFWS declared them endangered (and thus off-limits for anything invasive or distressing) in 2015. Great apes can be used for observational studies (like kids), but I think even drawing blood for non-vet reasons is now pretty regulated.
Other primates, especially rhesus monkeys and, increasingly, marmosets, are important model animals for lab experiments but are less closely related to humans.
Sources for the down voters: https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statem...
The point was not to demonstrate which exact subspecies of primate that is used.
I do this stuff for a living. I know that primates are a valuable translational model, which is why I've spent the last 15 years working with them in neuroscience labs.
On the other hand, I also know that it's an ethically-tricky form of research too[+]. Public support for research depends on people understanding what we're doing and why. Conflating chimps with marmosets (which are still primates, but much less "human-like") or rhesus monkeys risks eroding that support. For example, I'm fine with genetically engineering marmosets; I would have serious misgivings about doing the same thing to generate autistic or Parkinsonian chimps.
Therefore, I think this is an important distinction and not being careful about it puts the benefits of primate work--that you're trying to champion!--at risk.
[+] For what it's worth, we do take excellent care of them.
Along with the ethical issues, the Institute of Medicine concluded that it wasn’t scientifically warranted. Data from chimps would be slightly closer to humans, but it’s also hard to get: they are dangerously strong (much more so than macaques, which are already terrifying), grow very slowly, and need tons of care and space—-and therefore money—-to thrive. Those trade offs, made starker by ethical issues, lead them to wind down chimp research. As a tech analogy, writing a browser in assembler is closer” to the hardware and could theoretically result in faster code, but in practice nobody does it because it wouldn’t be worthwhile.
Fairly little research is done in monkeys for the same reason. Mice are faster, easier, and offer more tools. This isn’t always a good thing; in fact, my last few projects have made a big deal about the value of a monkey data over rats. Nevertheless, I have zero desire to spin up an ape version.
Let's simplify so you have another way of looking at it:
OP: COVID shares 90% DNA with SARS so the vaccines would be similar.
OC: We share 99% DNA with chimps, so what?
Me: We use chimps in research because they are so close to us.
You: Well actually we don't anymore because of ethical concerns
You "well actually"ed my point WHILE agreeing with my point.
I will cop to being short-tempered with the sheer amount of rubbish science floating around (generally and for covid-related things specifically), and for that I apologize. Wasn't shooting for arrogant so much as "you may not know that..."
It's pretty clear you don't realize this, but I don't think anybody in these threads have been arguing with your science. We also agree that experimenting on chimps is wrong.
What everybody has been doing, with various degrees of hilarity, is try to get you to see that your disagreement with my original point; we use(d) chimps in biomedical research because of their genetic similarity so using genetic similarity as a rebuttal to the SARS/COVID vaccine link makes no sense.
Facts matter and you're choosing to ignore the original fact that you disagreed with and make up some straw man fact that you can tilt at.
Chimps are not--and weren't ever--a major part of biomedical research. I just looked on PubMed, which indexes pretty much all biomedical research. "Chimpanzee" returns twelve thousand articles; "monkey" returns 18.5 million.
I don't disagree that we can learn interesting things about evolution or anthropology from chimp research; I have lunch with a comparative anatomy lab all the time. At the same time, chimp research is mostly very basic science-focused. I can only think of one counter-example, which is the development of Hepatitis B vaccine. This was done in chimps and because of their close similarity to humans: other animals appear not to get Hep B. While this sort of proves your point, it's a singular exception rather than the rule.
Edit: Found the registration. It’s a weird combined Phase I and II: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04324606
I was rejected because I had cancer (years ago but they don't need any extra factors) but this is mostly like a normal Phase I in that the primary question is: Do humans tolerate this vaccine? Roughly half those recruited (at random) get a different vaccine, an irrelevant one, that protects against Meningitus but we've no reason to think would make any difference to a coronavirus - and half get the new one. You can't tell what it was they stuck in your arm, so they can compare the two groups to see if any side effects were significantly more common for the new vaccine.
Because this coronavirus is widespread in the community they will also unavoidably get to collect information that would usually be the purpose of Phase II/III trials - did the group who got the "real" vaccine get COVID-19 symptoms less often that the other group? Or if they did, were they less severe?
You normally don't do this, and if you tried an ethics committee would stop you - it's unethical to expose patients to a novel risk when you haven't even figured out if the treatment you're trying is safe first. But in this case the risk is already there, for absolutely everyone, so you aren't making anything worse by just measuring if your treatment helped.
In this case, it looks like the Oxford group had previously used the same ChAdOx platform to make a MERS vaccine, and they’re leveraging that data (here: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3...) to move more quickly into a combined Phase I and II trial.
Our inability to develop a vaccine for HIV is not very relevant as they are very different viruses.
The development of this vaccine has not been from a standing start. From the article: "The Oxford team has already developed a vaccine against Mers, another type of coronavirus, using the same approach - and that had promising results in clinical trials.".