[ExI] Human Challenge Trials

[John Clark]

If you want to do something drastic to end this virus nightmare there is
something we could do that would be far more effective than waiting for
herd immunity as well as being less ethically questionable, although I'm
sure some would still clutch their pearls in horror, I'm referring to Human
Challenge Trials. The idea is young healthy volunteers would be injected
with a experimental vaccine (or a placebo) and then deliberately infected
with the COVID-19 virus. This would dramatically speed up vaccine
development and save many thousands, perhaps millions, of lives; not to
mention stop the economy from collapsing into rubble. The death rate for
young healthy people who get COVID-19 is only about 1.4 deaths per 10,000
and the death rate for those who volunteer as kidney donors is 3 times
that, we accept one as being ethical why not the other?
As one ethicist put it:

*"This is the trolley problem where the fat man wants to jump knowing his
chance of death is below 1% and our decision is whether to stop him."*

Should volunteers to be infected with coronavirus to test vaccines?
<https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/united-states-should-allow-volunteers-be-infected-coronavirus-test-vaccines-lawmakers#>

Human Challenge Trials—A Coronavirus Taboo
<https://quillette.com/2020/05/01/human-challenge-trials-a-coronavirus-taboo/>

John K Clark
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20200508/d076ed9b/attachment.htm>