> We can't measure that directly because we can't just expose a bunch of folks to Covid and hope for the best.
We can, but medical ethics hasn't caught up yet. I would participate in a challenge trial, for instance.
We can, but medical ethics hasn't caught up yet. I would participate in a challenge trial, for instance.
It would mean handling live virus, which requires a Biosafety Level 3 facilities.
And, it's not going to get your vaccine approved any quicker.
Quite the example of the asymmetry. If you engage with the problem you have to operate absolutely perfectly. Way better not to engage with it and kill a few hundred thousand people. After all, no one can blame you for that part.
And of course it's not going to get the vaccine 'approved' quicker because yeah, 'approval' is also subject to the same people. But it will let us know if it works and whether it hurts.
Those things are not true alternatives.
I said "it's not going to get your vaccine approved any quicker" in the hope that you would understand: vaccines have reached the point of global distribution without doing the additional deliberate harm of intentionally infecting people.
Of course I am healthy, my family has had the vaccine or the disease and punched through, so I don't really care all that much.
The bottleneck has generally been manufacturing rather than approval so far. It may shift to distribution.
Me too. And nearly everyone I know in my risk tier.
We had an entire globe of low-risk people willing to be part of the most acute spread, whether for research, for personal immunity, or to be able to isolate for a defined time to protect loved ones, and we squandered it in favor of pseudoscientific horizontal interdictions like lockdowns. It's really an incredible abandonment of basic principles of public health.
But there's a lot of information we left on the table. We had an opportunity to systematically formulate a controlled acute spread, studying the virology in a longitudinal way, studying the immune response in a more intimate and controlled way (from antibodies to the immune response after antibodies fade), and to examine the prevalence and role of innate immunity.
Beyond research, we had a chance to have tens of millions of people with verifiable immunity in Spring or Summer. People who then were in a great position to render aid to the marginalized communities who are instead bearing the brunt of lockdowns.
Instead, we traded all that for zero upside. And we have to deal with the enormous side effects of the horizontal interdiction as well.