What seems to be vague... They didn't contract Covid, but we're they exposed to it in a lab environment, or just set off on their way to be evaluated x months later?
Additionally, you can apply common sense that if 15,000 people were exposed to the virus with no protection, more than 90 of them would become infected.
The Nazis did it, and US military does similar kind of shit (I reserve the word science) too.
This is what is referred to as a 'challenge trial'[0]. It is something the UK is apparently working on but afaik, neither of the current vaccine candidates have used any form of challenge trial. This is one of the difficulties with vaccine testing...if I were to vaccinate everyone in the world against small pox, how do I prove it's effectiveness?
[0] https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/a-challenge-trial...
Edit: for some fun, I figured I should link to the 'COVID challenge trial volunteers advocacy organization'. Yes, an advocacy group for people who want to be infected with COVID. https://1daysooner.org/
It could have saved a huge number of lives, but that's not how the system works.
Nobody is getting covid on purpose, in a lab. Being protective or unprotective against a lab dose isn't the same as being protective or unprotective against a real-world dose.
They seem to talk about it right near the top of major news stories, so I guess they are proposing it:
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-54612293
You might also get useful information about how people's immune systems react, when you give them too little of the virus to get infected. It's not only about figuring out the dose for the main trial. It also could have been done 6 months ago...
Depends. If there are volunteers for it, (which I can imagine to be the case) - and the volunteers are fully aware of the risk - then it might be ethical to let them proceed and save millions of other people.
1. You have to have a control group, so half of test subjects would be exposed to the virus without having received the vaccine.
2. The highest-priority recipients for a vaccine are members of high-risk groups; it'd be pointless to run a challenge trial full of low-risk individuals.
So a challenge trial wouldn't just mean giving the virus to a few thousand vaccinated macho 20-year-olds. It'd mean giving the virus to unvaccinated 80-year-old care home residents.
This is binary all-or-nothing thinking. It considers 90% the same as 0%, since both are not 100%.
Testing on healthy young people you learn how a normal immune system reacts to a vaccine candidate. High risk groups mostly have similar immune systems.
Even if somehow you could only vaccinate everyone under 60, that would do enormous good stopping the spread.
Thinking is not just "binary or not"; there are degrees. If exposing that group of people would be 90% pointless, it's not much less out of the question than if it were 100% pointless.
You're right about the principle, of course. I just think it would be "10% pointless", and thus well worth doing.
The trials have a set "Covid-19 cases" mark where the stop to evaluate. The Pfizer vaccine has 164 contractions of Covid-19 as their mark to conclude the research. This research seems to aim for 151.
The Moderna vaccine, which is based on similar mRNA technology as BioNTech’s, is expected to be assessed by the FDA on a final analysis of 151 Covid cases among trial participants who will be followed on average for more than two months.
If both groups are similar enough you can then say how effective the vaccine is in preventing it.
This, by the way, is why most phase 3 trials take place in the US and/or Brazil (among other places): the more Covid-19 is around the faster you can get to the set number of contractions and conclude the phase 3.
There's no easy blanket "unethical" ruling from on high. Obviously this isn't a risk-free thing to volunteer for, but it isn't risk free for nurses to go to work either, and thankfully, they still do.