Vaccines: Should humans serve as guinea pigs?

“An idea that might seem outlandish at first is gaining some ground as a way to speed development of a coronavirus vaccine,” said Peter Sullivan in TheHill.com. “Human challenge trials” would require a group of volunteers to get a potential vaccine and then be deliberately exposed to the virus to test whether it works.

Last week, 35 House legislators urged the FDA to allow the method, comparing it to a dangerous mission undertaken during a time of war. There is no shortage of volunteers willing to become human guinea pigs for such testing. Nearly 4,000 people from 52 countries have signed up on the website 1daysooner.org—even though some could become seriously ill, or even die.

Here’s why human challenge trials might be justified, said Dylan Matthews in Vox.com. Normally, creating a vaccine is a 12- to 18-month affair. During phases I and II, it’s first tested on animals; then a small group of humans. During phase

III, scientists inject thousands with a potential vaccine and others with a placebo. They then go about their lives, with some getting exposed to the virus in the real world, and months later, rates of infection between the two groups are compared. By intentionally giving humans a dose of the virus in a laboratory, scientists could shave several months off phase III. Normally, this would be “ethically unthinkable,” said Donald McNeil Jr. in The New York Times. Today, only “completely curable” illnesses like malaria and typhoid fever involve challenge trials. But there is no cure for Covid-19, and it can result in serious illness and death; that has made some doctors extremely uncomfortable with the idea. “I think it’s very unethical,” said Dr. Daniel Lucey, a pandemics specialist at Georgetown University.

The volunteers would beg to differ, said Conor Friedersdorf in TheAtlantic.com. In interviews, they cited not only the untold lives they could save by putting their lives on the line, but also the “mass suffering”—job loss, hunger, evictions. “It is not a riskless thing,” said Josh Morrison, a former corporate lawyer who has volunteered for a challenge trial. But “if you think this will move a vaccine forward by even a day and save thousands of lives, the ratio of volunteer lives lost to lives saved would be thousands to one.” It’s a compelling argument. Why would we turn him and other altruistic volunteers down? Given what’s at stake, challenge trials are not only ethically acceptable. They’re “ethically imperative.’’