What's the catch? Is it significantly riskier than the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines? Is it easy to make a mistake while producing this and end up with something ineffective or harmful? Is it just not particularly effective?
Find a few thousand smart, maybe insane, biohackers. Give them each a $100k grant. Give them total immunity from FDA regulation. Free them from all the bureaucratic and ethical shackles that slow down establishment science. At a cost of $300 million, even a 1% chance that one of them figures out a way to double the rate of vaccination, constitutes a 1000%+ return on investment.
I haven’t heard of a single one of the available vaccines being held back by regulations, only the speed at which they could go through human trials.
The vaccine trials were drastically slowed down by the regulations against human challenge trials.
If you were dealing with a disease that is rare so that it might take a long time for enough people in phase II or III to get exposed to it naturally, an HCT might be able to cut the amount of time you need for phase II and maybe phase III.
With COVID, there should be enough people getting exposed naturally to make that unnecessary in phase III and probably in phase II.
What an HCT might do for a COVID vaccine is let you figure out early that your vaccine does not work. That might let you abandon an ineffective vaccine during phase II instead of not finding out it doesn't work until after you have spent a lot of time and money on phase III.
i.e. if your argument applies word for word against Semmelweis (who advocated hand-washing) or doubters against other earlier amateur vaccines, it it will fall victim to what we now know about those older cases, when the at-the-time experts were wrong.
In this case I wouldn't say that the reason this kind of research is valuable is anything related to medicine per se - but more that it can show the value of the much lower liability level he operates in, and how it means that amateurs can make massive cuts in preparing and defending from lawsuits. Example: if a company realized that only food-quality ingredients were required, not lab-quality, would it be worth it for them to justify that to the FDA and spend millions on it? probably not. My hypothesis for what's going on in general in medicine is this effect times a thousand, at every stage of development.
(a) The ability to produce hundreds of millions of doses.
(b) Tests that prove (as convincingly as we can) that the vaccine are safe.
I don't see any evidence that anyone has any idea how to do better at either (a) or (b).
This blogpost completely ignores the difficult proof issue.
The pay for brave vaccine testers could have literally been $1m and we’d have saved several trillion bucks and potentially over a million lives. Hell, make it $10m or $100m and you'd still save a ton of money.
We've done this for several other viruses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_challenge_study
You're really going to force testers to potentially pick up the placebo, and then inject them with COVID19 forcefully? I mean yeah, it'd work, but its generally considered immoral under today's philosophy of science.
It would be quite possible for it to clearly be informed consent also, at least to the extent the disease was characterized at that point in time.
The reason people keep bringing it up is that the consequences of the pandemic have been much worse than the consequences of allowing a few thousand people to intentionally expose themselves to an infection in a controlled setting¹. It's not guaranteed that challenge trials would have mitigated the pandemic, but it's weird to just outright circumscribe the possibility when the ongoing downside is huge.
1. I use the odd phrasing here because lots of people pretty much choose to expose themselves to the infection anyway; maybe not explicitly, but close enough.
And if it wasn't immoral, what is the dollar limit?
Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos will never risk their life for "only" a million bucks. Find a depressed + suicidal dude somewhere else, and they may be personally willing to risk their life for just $100.
Making an industry of people who are willing to harm themselves for money is... probably not the business we should be encouraging. And that's assuming everyone is "playing nice". At a minimum, it means that we'll be inclined to start experimenting upon the poor and depressed (and then shedding away moral qualms because they signed a piece of paper).
Historically speaking in the USA, we have legacies like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, where African Americans were chosen as the control group and lied to about getting a Syphilis treatment: leading to a generation+ long distrust in science.
Yeah yeah, we can't "assume" scientists will be racist jackasses today. But... we still have to account for what happened in our history and why certain testing methodologies have become taboo.
I've thought for similar questions that a required baseline would be to at least have a society that provides a viable minimum social safety net, as well as free healthcare. When external conditions compel people to risk their health for survival, it is impossible to ensure sound ethics.
The point about ensuring that science and scientists can be trusted in the future is also an excellent point.
What's being proposed here is for people to sign up and then inject a potentially deadly disease into them.
Sure, the scale is massively different for a young healthy person: "susceptible to COVID" would mean a moderate chance of catching the disease (growing over time), and then a small chance of death or previous complications. But the "susceptibility" is also a "health condition" with nonzero risk-of-death.
And for society as a whole, COVID passed cancer as a cause of death last year, and in January 2021 has been killing about twice as many people as all cancers combined.
So "diagnosed-with-cancer" versus "susceptible-to-COVID" shouldn't be that different in terms of the kinds of risks we'd let informed people take to address that danger.
1) death is but only the worst outcome. Being on the space shuttle does bring risk, yes, but not a 50/50 chance of a significant impact to your general health.
2) you'll end up testing the vaccines largely on marginalized population and people with heavy financial problems, misrepresenting the population at large and showing biased result.
I would sign up for this in a heartbeat. Not only for the cash payment -- but you'd be a local hero and you could feel good for the rest of your life about taking a small risk to save the lives of many ill or elderly people.
The alternative that we chose was hundreds of thousands of more deaths and millions of more cases. From people who didn't sign up for it.
The risk to testers under 40 would have been negligible. I'm not being flippant about other peoples' lives -- I would have signed up myself if the compensation was high enough.
Luke Letlow (age 41) says otherwise, since he's dead. Okay, he's above 40, but he's high-profile and easy for me to remember. Plenty of sub 40 year olds have died.
Even among the survivors... plenty of young and healthy 20-30 year olds are having month-long recoveries, unable to breath at their old capacity.
Purposefully damaging the control group (who by definition, must NOT receive the vaccine) is immoral. Whether people in the control group believe in the potential harms of the disease or not.
Under 40 the survival rate is 99.98% for everyone -- including the already ill. If you screened for comorbidities and gave people great healthcare, you could get that 99.999% or higher. And save millions of lives (and trillions of dollars) by doing so.
I doubt that. But I'm not entirely sure how to calculate the numbers you just said.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
I realize this page changes, so I've taken a screenshot here: https://imgur.com/0iM5FHC
This is the chart of who died in January 2021. Yes, most deaths are aged 65+, but there's been deaths in all age categories. I doubt its 99.98% as you suggest (especially since the current case-mortality-rate is ~2.5%, at least for my state)
The official CDC numbers are stratified from 35 to 44, I'm not entirely sure who you are citing to get "below 40" age groups.
(1-7057/41659144)*100=99.983%
I expect the individual probability of surviving infection is not that high for each member of the group though. It's not clear if that meaning is intended anywhere above.
That's the total population of all 35 to 44 year olds in all of the USA.
> 99.983%
That's 0.02% of all 35 to 44 year olds have died, including those who never had COVID. IN ONE MONTH, not including the people who died two months ago, or 3 months ago.
It's for the entire period of the pandemic.
You are correct in pointing out that it isn't looking at deaths/infection.
A few bad cases and deaths that were consented to, versus hundreds of thousands to millions of cases and deaths from people that didn't consent. This morality scale doesn't make sense.
It's as if when there are some "professional" ethicists in the area who give "professional" ethical guidance, people lose their natural moral sense, and defer to their "professional" guidance no matter how silly it is if you apply even modicum of scrutiny.
This means you are choosing people to murder.
People can decide for themselves to take risks. You may not agree with the choices they make and that is your problem. Not theirs.
I honestly haven't thought deeply about the ethics, but it's really concerning that it has become such a hard rule that preventing people from injuring themselves in a particular way (we don't prevent lots of other forms of injury) is somehow obviously superior to letting tens of thousands of people die for lack of information.
It won't hurt the at risk groups to start up high volume manufacturing earlier (it will likely help them), and there is a benefit to everyone each time anyone is vaccinated (the reduction in transmission efficiency).
Optimizing deployment of the virus to bored 20 year olds may be popular among bored 20 year olds, but it isn't the best public health strategy.
Do you think the vaccines being distributed right now were manufactured more than a few weeks ago or something?
Remember it wasn't a given that mRNA vaccines were going to work, we were lucky.
What proportion of approved vaccines in general have such radically different responses in different age groups or demographics?
Yes, yes and yes. This is all good fun, but isn't a super novel vaccine. The vaccines that are currently being delivered were mostly developed within weeks of Chinese researchers sharing the genome sequences in January 2020. The bits that took the time were the safety and efficacy trials, which is what this is skipping. And it's not like $1000 for a household is cheap: the Oxford/AZ vaccine costs about $3.
It's like the difference between heroin and opioids
The only difference is that the researcher's limit for not understanding the code might be 150,000 lines, but only 50 atoms for not understanding the molecule. :)
Would I drink murky water in the woods? Maybe? Am I about to die of thirst and have no other clean water sources?
Would I take a vaccine made in a dude’s garage and posted on less wrong? Maybe? But only if there are no other options to keep me from a disease way worse than the horrors that covid actually is.
But it’s worth recognizing that this fear and noise in the system is the same type of thing that gave us an Arizona couple dead from drinking fish tank cleaner.
It might work or it might kill you. Please don't go snorting it until we know which.