3 ms·

Sometimes you need an outsider. I don't think that the issue with this is scientific -- basically we know that it might work, but we'd have to test it to know.

Sometimes you need an outsider. I don't think that the issue with this is scientific -- basically we know that it might work, but we'd have to test it to know. The problem is that medical ethics deviates from everyday ethics, and also ethics in other government regulated fields. This is mostly the legacy of Josef Mengele and to some extent the Tuskegee experiment, but collectively we essentially said "we never want to do that again, so let's make rules that keep us well away from that line." The reason the idea isn't getting much attention is that anyone in the field that is serious knows that the study would never get past an Institutional Review Board, so it's pointless to even try. It seems to me that we need to revisit our tenets of medical ethics in borderline cases like this one, where the stakes are so high. To me, you should be able to do riskier experiments in these cases if the subjects are truly informed volunteers, and you keep the risk to them to an absolute minimum consistent with doing the experiment. There's a very similar issue with vaccine challenge trials.

vikramkr 6y ago
The thing is, we already are doing way riskier experiments to deal with COVID. We sent the Moderna vaccine into human trials with barely any mouse data at all. What Hanson is proposing is giving his pet approach, inoculation with live virus, special treatment. The reason we're not pouring time and money into validating inoculation is because we have literally dozens of vaccine platforms, some with decades of evidence backing them up, that promise far higher theoretical safety and efficacy than inoculation's theoretical safety and efficacy. We'd rather pour our focus into approaches like moderna's vaccine, which could be highly scalable, and J&Js vaccine and AstraZeneca's vaccine because those platforms are known to work in other diseases. We've got companies like Codagenix using the tools of molecular biology to create attenuated forms of the virus without tradition time consuming development techniques. When we already have these candidates developed and have them barreling forward, why would anyone want to spend time and effort developing and testing a worse approach? The risk/reward doesn't make sense.
- cameldrv 6y ago
  Yes, but it's uncertain when those vaccines will be available or whether they will work. Even as a backup plan, it makes sense to me to evaluate variolation. With millions of lives worldwide and the entire global economy on the line, you do not want to put all your eggs into even ten baskets. As for the time and effort, I'm assuming that the existing vaccine developments are adequately staffed. There are many other medical researchers that are working on other things that could work on this.
Gibbon1 6y ago
> Sometimes you need an outsider. As someone that makes a living at the intersection of a couple of different fields maybe that is true. But the last person to take advice from is an academic economist. We literally have thousands of different trained professionals working on this right now and NONE of them think what Robin Hanson wants to do is a good idea.

vikramkr 6y ago

The thing is, we already are doing way riskier experiments to deal with COVID. We sent the Moderna vaccine into human trials with barely any mouse data at all. What Hanson is proposing is giving his pet approach, inoculation with live virus, special treatment. The reason we're not pouring time and money into validating inoculation is because we have literally dozens of vaccine platforms, some with decades of evidence backing them up, that promise far higher theoretical safety and efficacy than inoculation's theoretical safety and efficacy. We'd rather pour our focus into approaches like moderna's vaccine, which could be highly scalable, and J&Js vaccine and AstraZeneca's vaccine because those platforms are known to work in other diseases. We've got companies like Codagenix using the tools of molecular biology to create attenuated forms of the virus without tradition time consuming development techniques. When we already have these candidates developed and have them barreling forward, why would anyone want to spend time and effort developing and testing a worse approach? The risk/reward doesn't make sense.

cameldrv 6y ago
Yes, but it's uncertain when those vaccines will be available or whether they will work. Even as a backup plan, it makes sense to me to evaluate variolation. With millions of lives worldwide and the entire global economy on the line, you do not want to put all your eggs into even ten baskets. As for the time and effort, I'm assuming that the existing vaccine developments are adequately staffed. There are many other medical researchers that are working on other things that could work on this.

Gibbon1 6y ago

> Sometimes you need an outsider. As someone that makes a living at the intersection of a couple of different fields maybe that is true. But the last person to take advice from is an academic economist. We literally have thousands of different trained professionals working on this right now and NONE of them think what Robin Hanson wants to do is a good idea.