[ExI] Human Challenge Trials

[Dylan Distasio]

I don't really have an issue with what you're proposing, especially if the
volunteers were well compensated for taking a risk, but I think you're
leaving out the risk of taking a particular flavor of experimental vaccine
from your calculations.  I don't pretend to know what that risk is though.

On Fri, May 8, 2020 at 12:50 PM John Clark via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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
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