21 ms·
There is a strong argument for doing a challenge trial, using young people, on this candidate.
by oli5679 6y ago
There is a strong argument for doing a challenge trial, using young people, on this candidate.
- ttul 6y agoEven though I am not that young, I might sign up for that. If there is already evidence in vivo of the vaccine’s effectiveness, IMHO the risk would be tolerable.
- jseliger 6y agoI too would sign up; I signed up here: https://www.thecovidchallenge.org/ https://www.thecovidchallenge.org/ to support the effort.
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoRemember there would be a control group.
- jeremyjh 6y agoIn a study like that would half the participants still be in the control group?
- refurb 6y agoInfecting, or at least exposing, healthy, unvaccinated, people with the virus? Pretty sure that would never make it past an IRB review.
- roywiggins 6y agoBut a large majority will be exposed to the virus eventually anyway, if things keep going as they are. So what's the added risk if you're exposed earlier rather than later?
- yokaze 6y agoThat you are exposed while there is no known working treatment yet. Many attempts are in the works out even trials, but nothing proven. In the near foreseeable future, there might be one. One reason to have the lockdowns.
- usrusr 6y agoIs there anything promising at the treatment front right now? My impression is that there was an initial group of candidates for repurposing that have on closer investigation all turned out to be not quite as helpful as hoped.
- erfgh 6y agoNo, the reason for the lockdowns was to increase the chance that people will find care in the hospitals. I shudder at the thought of a government locking people up because a treatment might, at some point in the future, be found. It is of course besides the point but I find it extremely optimistic to expect that a treatment can be found that will significantly reduce deaths when deaths mostly occur in patients of very advanced age or with significant underlying conditions.
- BurningFrog 6y agoIt would have to be done outside the US.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoYes, how else could you know its efficacy?
- lbeltrame 6y agoI think it's ethically unacceptable. We're basically throwing everything we've learned with drug safety out of the window.
- apsec112 6y agoIf your country is invaded, is it unethical to let young, healthy volunteers form an army and fight back, even at some risk to themselves? It shouldn't be illegal to let people take reasonable, calculated risks for the good of everyone.
- lbeltrame 6y agoIMO, institutional review boards in charge of trials would not let this pass, for a good reason. Especially because you can't (obviously) use a control group. 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).
- apsec112 6y agoOf course it involves some risk. But the alternative is that millions of others, many older and with compromised immune systems, would get the virus involuntarily because the vaccine trials took longer to run. Is it ethical to ban research that saves thousands of lives?
- bathtub365 6y agoYou don’t know that the research will save thousands of lives, or kill thousands, until it’s done.
- brutusborn 6y agoWhat proportion of vaccine trials are successful usually? Could the probability of efficacy be estimated and used to judge if the study goes ahead? There needs to be a reasonable amount of risk taken in research, otherwise we will find it impossible to make progress.