WHO Conditionally Backs Covid-19 Vaccine Trials that Infect People (theguardian.com) 71
Controversial trials in which volunteers are intentionally infected with Covid-19 could accelerate vaccine development, according to the World Health Organization, which has released new guidance on how the approach could be ethically justified despite the potential dangers for participants. From a report: So-called challenge trials are a mainstream approach in vaccine development and have been used in malaria, typhoid and flu, but there are treatments available for these diseases if a volunteer becomes severely ill. For Covid-19, a safe dose of the virus has not been established and there are no failsafe treatments if things go wrong. Scientists, however, increasingly agree that such trials should be considered, and the WHO is the latest body to indicate conditional support for the idea. "There's this emerging consensus among everyone who has thought about this seriously," said Prof Nir Eyal, the director of Rutgers University's Center for Population-Level Bioethics in the US.
Volunteers sometimes die (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the nature of the job.
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Some people regularly volunteer (for pay) to test drugs of many kinds, many of which can have tremendous side effects.
Kind of like how indentured servants volunteered. (Score:3, Insightful)
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People lack the capacity to understand things like this around here. Their only job is to make mistakes, blame other people for them while asking them to also pay for them, and ultimately do nothing different next time around, and even defend their own ignorance.
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no no... we already have them... no testing necessary... we also allow and encourage them to vote!
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Extreme sports participation is up faster than population for everything I could find numbers for.
People still go into space on a controlled explosion (and almost nobody has ever taken one to the moon). When asked if they would take a 1-way trip to Mars that would lead to death within a few years at most, they got an overwhelming number of volunteers.
A CEO injected himself with CRISPR live onstage.
You can buy wrist-mounted fireball flamethrowers on amazon. That's a bit more metal than a damn lighter.
There
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So all paid US drug testing facilities are slave operations?
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You can't sell yourself into slavery because if you're already at the point where you're doing that then you were already a defacto slave.
I know I'm reading way more into your comment than you likely intended, but it's the sort of comment that gets under my skin, since it sounds insightful until you give it a little more thought and realize it's actually a rather pithy statement that goes against what we know to be true. Namely, life is full of inflection points—crossroads at which we choose the path our life takes—and a statement like yours would deny both their existence and the personal responsibility that comes with them, inst
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Re:Volunteers sometimes die (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, I don't see why this is so ethically difficult... You are a healthy 20 or 30-something, they pay you some money in exchange for infecting you with a disease that has something like a 1 in 10,000 chance of killing you. You sign the disclosure as an informed adult and contribute to a program that will most likely end up saving 10s of thousands of lives. People make much more reckless decisions with their lives every day with absolutely zero societal benefit.
Re:Volunteers sometimes die (Score:5, Insightful)
You are a healthy 20 or 30-something, pretty poor, then physicians from the US government offer to give you free health care in exchange for letting them do a bit of research. Then your dick falls off, you go crazy, and die.
Sure, this is different. But people think very carefully about ethics in medical research because really bad things have happened before.
Re:Volunteers sometimes die (Score:4, Funny)
You are a healthy 20 or 30-something, pretty poor, then physicians from the US government offer to give you free health care in exchange for letting them do a bit of research. Then your dick falls off, you go crazy, and die.
But you didn't make it clear: do you go crazy and die because your dick falls off, or are they three separate symptoms?
Re:Volunteers sometimes die (Score:5, Interesting)
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Two points. Firstly, the Tuskegee experiment [wikipedia.org] did withhold treatment for syphilis, but it didn't infect anyone. Still bad, but there's a vast ethical gulf between what they actually did and what you're alleging.
Secondly, the Tuskegee experiment withheld treatment for syphilitic black *men*: its formal title was "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male". For some reason, when it's brought up, people emphasize the racism, but completely ignore the sexism.
Re: Volunteers sometimes die (Score:2)
Re:Volunteers sometimes die (Score:5, Insightful)
In times of war, we conscript young men with or without their consent and send them off to potentially die in a faraway land. We do this for "the greater good", a concept which in 2020 seems largely forgotten in first world countries.
In the midst of a global pandemic, asking some healthy people to risk their lives to save the lives of millions seems like a small price to pay.
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Okay, I'll bite - why haven't YOU volunteered?
Or is it only those Other People expendable that way?
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Okay, I'll bite - why haven't YOU volunteered?
Or is it only those Other People expendable that way?
He practically volunteered with his speech. If he knows it is another matter.
His comparison to wars is pure comedy. Imagine people during WWII staying at home, thinking the war cannot get them there. I tell you what, I'll volunteer the moment the virus crashes through the roof of my house and explodes like a bomb.
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"Okay, I'll bite - why haven't YOU volunteered? "
Bone spurs, obviously, you walked right into that one.
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I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but it's tasteless to pretend that death is the only risk that matters.
The actual ethics of challenge trials (Score:2)
To oversimplify, the biggest consideration is whether the volunteer will receive as good or better medical treatment than someone who isn't in the trial and also catches COVID-19. That's directly derived from US syphilis trials, where the doctors withheld treatment from the people being tested.
See also https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
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If the risk is only 1 in 10,000 to a 20 year old we should be asking boomers to volunteer. They are far more likely to die so it is in their interests to take that risk, and the generation above them is too old to participate.
Asks some healthy 55-65 year olds to trial the treatment.
The problem isn't that Volunteers sometimes die (Score:2, Insightful)
A vaccine will be worth billions by itself. Reopening the global economy is worth trillions. Do you think we'd let a few hundred die for that? [wikipedia.org] I do.
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When we "let/sometimes make" people die and also pay for it yes... yes we would!
But that is not the problem here and it should be made clear.
People have the right to decide on therapy that is crazy or asinine if they like so long as the decision is an informed one and not coerced. Physicians have the right to deny or advance a cure. What people do not have the right to do... is control other peoples access to care due to regulations or for snake oil salesmen to make claims that are not tested or meet test
Why is that a problem? (Score:1)
The volunteers know the risk. Can you seriously not think of altruistic reasons why many people would be willing to take that risk?
Re: The problem isn't that Volunteers sometimes di (Score:2)
And?
Death happens to everyone.
What matters is if it was worth is.
A loser who spent 120 years achieving *nothing*, is a more tragic death than anyone from Kurt Cobain over those who fought the Nazis to those who died in a vaccine trial that saved billions.
I gladly and proudly would die for it. *Because* I do not want my life to go to waste.
I thought America was big on the idea of heroism.
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Leeeeeeroy Jenkins!
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I think there was a governor who said his generation would by happy to take any risk for the benefit of their children and grandchildren.
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"Any Risk" That governor is evil and saying something like this is proof of it.
There have never been or will ever be such a generation that does this because you can find a lot of empirical and anecdotal evidence all over history.
I will not become a slave if my grandchildren are guaranteed to become million or billionaires. It would be like saying the slaves that now have children living in a free country like America vs Africa would have been happy to come and be a slave. There is not a single person th
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I agree, you'd never get buy in from a whole generation. And a generation that's grown up in cushy modern America even less so.
However, many individuals effectively sold themselves into slavery for their families. It's called indentured servitude.
Re: Volunteers sometimes die (Score:1)
Meanwhile some generations gladly would take *any* risk to avoid taking the risk of being alive. :)
"We have to make sure at all costs, that the product we buy costs nothing." :D
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2. no detail about what kind of volunteers they selected, but it's likely they tapped into the not-at-risk population
So it's not like volunteers were exposed to some Chernobyl high radiation.
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Sure, and while we're in support of really stupid ideas should we ask prisoners, ex-convicts, homeless people, mexicans and any non-white people first.
I'm being sarcastic of course.
People need to be protected, all of them, and not coerced into becoming victims with volunteer schemes just so the more privileged ones can survive longer. Or does anyone here believe that in a world crisis suddenly everyone puts their differences aside and gives up their privileges? Hell no! People have already shown that they'r
Re: Bernie Bros volunteer (Score:1)
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Weren't there plenty of Republicans willing to die to save the economy and the American way of life? Why not use the willing participants first. Before the brainwashed Bernie Bros?
It's just a cold anyway in a healthy person.
Isn't it?
WHO is as relevant as a rusty birdcage (Score:1)
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All orgs have a degree of riff-raff because humans are involved, and humans are highly flawed. If we ended every org having riff-raff, there'd be no orgs, just individual raff.
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Sure we should get to yell at them and question their guidance, just as we do with our politicians and other policy makers, but that just comes with a free society. If we were b
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We have accepted, for thousands of years, that a person may join a military understanding that they will be shot, stabbed, and generally face fates with a higher mortality rate than COVID. We have accepted volunteers, and at times, we have simply told people that they must go or be imprisoned or killed. The entire world is, at this time, occupied by COVID almost as if there were armies in the streets shutting down stores, enforcing strict curfews, and killing civilians at random.
If someone now wishes to vol
Not wrong if it is your choice. (Score:1)
Just like those old folks in Japan who volunteered to work in radioactive zones, because they will die before the cancer gets them anyway.
The problem would only be, if it was not their own choice.
(That includes being manipulated into choosing it. Like false memories, NLP, and PR/marekting in general. And it includea childen and mentaly disabled, drugged or desperate people.)
Doug Stanhope once made that joke with eugenics. Just offer every idiot a free ride with their favorite e.g. redneck celebrity for cutt
Re: WHO is a Sock Puppet for China (Score:1)
Calling a jumbled tweet a "decision" is a bit of a stretch.
Ultimately each nation runs their own country, not the WHO. Leaders carry the responsibility for decisions, and must weigh information from external organizations carefullly. And governments with the resources to run large health and crisis teams can operate fairly independent of the WHO. (As the US's CDC and UK's NHS have done)
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That cutting off trips from China was a farce. People kept coming back with full government approval, and weren't immediately put into quarantine. Much better would have been no embargo on traveling, but a requirement for a 2 week quarantine on arrival. As it was it was purely political theater.
FWIW, COVID was already in the country and spreading by the time he blocked trips, so it wouldn't have had that much effect even if he'd done it properly, but he didn't want to do it properly, because that wouldn
Ethics? They've heard of it. (Score:2)
They think it's the English county next to Thuffolk.
Pay me $1M up front, guarantee medical care.. (Score:2)
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No WAY Townsend would go for this! (Score:2)
It's gotta be Daltry's doing!
First, do no harm... (Score:2)
Looks like WHO etc. skipped to the next point.
If they proceed, at the very least, I hope they don't use controls in the trial (volunteers who they inject a placebo, not a vaccine, and then deliberately infect).
This is china trying to get approval ... (Score:1)
... because they were already doing this (wuhan outbreak) and want to ramp up the scale. Or am I just being cynical?
Dafuq!? (Score:1)
I'm slightly disappointed. (Score:1)
When reading the headline, I thought that the WHO was conditionally backing a trial of a vaccine that would spread via contagion -- thereby also vaccinating anyone who came in contact with people who'd received the vaccine intravenously.
On the other hand, I'm somewhat relieved that there doesn't seem to yet be a contagious vaccine for anything.
I can imagine it as something from a science fiction thriller: a horrible disease grips the world, so to fight against it scientists create a vaccine that can spread