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The reason it would be faster is at the moment it is not considered ethical to deliberately expose people to the virus after giving them a vaccine. Because we c

The reason it would be faster is at the moment it is not considered ethical to deliberately expose people to the virus after giving them a vaccine. Because we can’t do the exposing we have to use the large field trial approach and wait for people to get ill on their own (or not). These take a long time. If we had a safe strain of the virus then we could do the exposing. I explain this much more in a previous post on my blog [0]. 0. https://www.tillett.info/2020/04/24/it-is-unethical-to-not-search-for-an-attenuated-sars-cov-2-strain/ https://www.tillett.info/2020/04/24/it-is-unethical-to-not-s...

irjustin 6y ago
Got it, my assumption for Step 3 existing is wrong. It simply doesn't! Thanks for this explanation and the series of blog posts.
tempestn 6y ago
There are those that argue even without a safer strain it is ethical under certain circumstances to still perform that sort of "challenge trial" though, where people are deliberately exposed. A number of conditions would have to be met, such as all volunteer participation of course, very clear explanation and demonstration of understanding, no financial incentive, etc. But a faster vaccine could save many more lives than would be risked in the trial, and the risk itself could be very low, given the trial participants would be monitored closely and would get excellent medical care. Also obviously it would be restricted to young, healthy people without pre-existing conditions. To me it seems like a solid argument that given all those conditions (and possibly others I haven't thought of or mentioned), such a trial should be allowed. My understanding is that there are many people preemptively volunteering to participate.
- danieltillett 6y ago
  Even if it is ethical to use a strain we know is dangerous, we would still be amiss to use such a strain just because we were too lazy to look for a safer strain. We should only use a dangerous strain if we try hard and fail to find a safer strain. We haven’t even tried yet.
  - tempestn 6y ago
    Yes, certainly.
JulianMorrison 6y ago
In practise they would probably be testing on heavily-exposed people (doctors and nurses etc). But it would speed things up some to be able to do controlled exposure.

irjustin 6y ago

Got it, my assumption for Step 3 existing is wrong. It simply doesn't! Thanks for this explanation and the series of blog posts.

tempestn 6y ago

There are those that argue even without a safer strain it is ethical under certain circumstances to still perform that sort of "challenge trial" though, where people are deliberately exposed. A number of conditions would have to be met, such as all volunteer participation of course, very clear explanation and demonstration of understanding, no financial incentive, etc. But a faster vaccine could save many more lives than would be risked in the trial, and the risk itself could be very low, given the trial participants would be monitored closely and would get excellent medical care. Also obviously it would be restricted to young, healthy people without pre-existing conditions. To me it seems like a solid argument that given all those conditions (and possibly others I haven't thought of or mentioned), such a trial should be allowed. My understanding is that there are many people preemptively volunteering to participate.

danieltillett 6y ago
Even if it is ethical to use a strain we know is dangerous, we would still be amiss to use such a strain just because we were too lazy to look for a safer strain. We should only use a dangerous strain if we try hard and fail to find a safer strain. We haven’t even tried yet.
- tempestn 6y ago
  Yes, certainly.

JulianMorrison 6y ago

In practise they would probably be testing on heavily-exposed people (doctors and nurses etc). But it would speed things up some to be able to do controlled exposure.