I think it's ethically unacceptable. We're basically throwing everything we've learned with drug safety out of the window.
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?
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.
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.