<story><title>Coronavirus human challenge study gets green light in UK</title><url>https://www.politico.eu/article/worlds-first-coronavirus-human-challenge-study-gets-green-light-in-uk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>handmodel</author><text>I signed up for human challenge trials last spring so had lots of debates on this - it usually ended with the person saying directly or indirectly &amp;quot;Bioethicists have discussed this for decades and understand it more than you&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I found this extremely unconvincing. A group of unelected people, mostly from the same social class, being able to determine the rules of something so important seemed inherently flawed to me.&lt;p&gt;In this particular situation, I saw it as signing up to be a soldier for my country (which always covers some personal risk) - with the number of lives that could have been saved by  April 2020 human challenge trial being in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>akiselev</author><text>Human medical experimentation has a horrifying history and &lt;i&gt;in living memory alone&lt;/i&gt; we have the atrocities during WWII, MK ultra, Tuskegee experiment, past (and ongoing) experiments on aboriginal populations, Operation Whitecoat, the Ohio prison experiments, and the entire pharma industry pre-Kefauver-Harris Drug Amendment but the Beecher paper really drove home how widespread the practice was in regular medical research. Unethical experimentation wasn&amp;#x27;t the stuff of war crimes, it was a relatively common practice for everyday medical researchers even a few decades ago with dire consequences for medicine.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s no more elitist than an electrician telling someone that they can&amp;#x27;t wire their house themselves &amp;quot;because construction and safety organizations have studied this for decades and understand it more than you&amp;quot; when burning down the entire block is a very real possibility.&lt;p&gt;The consequences of breaches in medical ethics have been dire: to this day minority and aboriginal populations have worse health outcomes because they have lower trust in the medical establishment and even relatively small breaches in trust like the CIA vaccination program in Pakistan can have devastating effects like the revival of polio.&lt;p&gt;Bioethics and &amp;quot;modern&amp;quot; medicine are relative new so we&amp;#x27;re well into the conservative whiplash stage of the natural &amp;quot;boom and bust cycle&amp;quot; but for a damn good reason. You&amp;#x27;re not going to appreciate the seriousness of the subject without really digging into the very recent history of bioethics.</text></comment>
<story><title>Coronavirus human challenge study gets green light in UK</title><url>https://www.politico.eu/article/worlds-first-coronavirus-human-challenge-study-gets-green-light-in-uk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>handmodel</author><text>I signed up for human challenge trials last spring so had lots of debates on this - it usually ended with the person saying directly or indirectly &amp;quot;Bioethicists have discussed this for decades and understand it more than you&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I found this extremely unconvincing. A group of unelected people, mostly from the same social class, being able to determine the rules of something so important seemed inherently flawed to me.&lt;p&gt;In this particular situation, I saw it as signing up to be a soldier for my country (which always covers some personal risk) - with the number of lives that could have been saved by  April 2020 human challenge trial being in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tyho</author><text>I agree. The Moderna vaccine was created in a weekend, it took many months to run trials in a way that compiled with bioethicist diktat to prove efficacy . The limiting factor in the speed of the clinical trials is the rate at which people acquire COVID naturally. During the summer there were serious worries that the vaccine trials would fail due to low transmission rates.&lt;p&gt;Had the clinical trials run in a &amp;quot;less ethical&amp;quot; way, say by taking young and healthy people like myself, vaccinating them and then deliberately exposing them to COVID, then we might have seen vaccination start much sooner. Far fewer would have died and the colossal impact of lockdowns would have been mostly avoided.</text></comment>