If we went all Jenner on vaccine research, how long would it take to develop one for use?

[Esprise_Me]

I’m uncomfortable offering time off prisoners’ sentences for participating in vaccine trials. It’s incredibly coercive, and if they can be deemed sufficiently rehabilitated/safe to reenter society in less time, then that’s when they should be released, regardless of whether they’re willing to be our guinea pigs. I’m not necessarily opposed to allowing prisoners to participate at all, especially because they’re at such great risk from the virus itself. But we have to ensure they are making the choice knowingly and willingly, not under duress.

[filmstar-en]

These ethical considerations can easily be avoided by simply paying people to participate in a vaccine trial. This already happens when they trial flu vaccines and then give a dose of the virus.

In London, with its large student population, this has long been a useful way of earning extra cash.

Learn more about Clinical Trials from FluCamp

Corvid-19, given is riskier, there no established drug treatments. If a volunteer becomes seriously ill all that can be done is to alleviate the symptoms using oxygen and ventilators. There is no 100% cure. Deliberate exposure to the virus could be fatal.

On the other hand large Phase 3 clinical trials and involve waiting for people to be exposed to virus in the community. These delays can be translated into deaths worldwide as the COVID-19 pandemic progresses.

The time can be shortened by deliberate exposure to volunteers during the trial, which would require far fewer participants.

Here some experts discuss it.

Human Challenge Studies to Accelerate Coronavirus Vaccine Licensure

Here is a more digestible report hot off the press.

To find a coronavirus vaccine, can we ethically infect people with a disease...

The ethical quandary will be fast upon us. As of Tuesday, eight candidate vaccines were in clinical evaluation, four in China, one in Britain, one in the European Union and two in the United States, according to the World Health Organization. None are yet at Phase III trials, in which a vaccine is tested on large numbers of people to see if it works, is safe or has side effects.

Typically, such trials would be years away. Now, they could begin this year. Last week the Trump administration created Operation Warp Speed to cut development of a vaccine by at least eight months.

The Food and Drug Administration, which regulates vaccines, is looking hard at the scientific, ethical and feasibility questions raised by such a drastically shortened schedule.

“A formal determination about any specific human challenge trial proposal would be made by the FDA in the context of all the information that is available at that time,” said spokesman Michael Felberbaum.

Exactly when challenge trials will happen or what guidelines will be changed to make them possible have not been revealed.

Four in China…

Somehow, I doubt whether there has been much time spent in China considering the ethical issues and this gives it a big advantage in this race.

Who will be first to develop a safe vaccine to save the world from Covid-19?

I am sure the political implications of this vaccine race are not lost on world leaders.

:dubious:

[AK84]

@dropzone

Thank you. Twenty years here and there is still stuff for me to learn, or mentally retrieve from a lifetime of accumulated information. F’rinstance, I learned that the OP was talking about EDWARD Jenner, not Bruce, and I thought there were some steps I’m not willing to take to be healthy. Of course, the difference is that he hasn’t taken that step, either, and l’ve been Corvidized.

:eek:
Dear God, I hope there is no actual relation between the two.
(Is there a vaccine for the Kardashians).

[Triskadecamus]

I find the concept of “informed consent without coercion” from someone incarcerated in a prison an odious and politically convenient fairy tale.

[PastTense]

A new strain of the novel coronavirus appears to be more contagious than the version that gained footing at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study led by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).

The new strain, dubbed D614G, surfaced in Europe in February before appearing in the east coast of the United States. It has been the dominant strain across the world since mid-March, according to the report. That fact is raising concerns, not just over the new strain’s infectivity but also because some believe the existence of a secondary strain may make some patients vulnerable to a second infection after surviving a different strain.

The coronavirus has mutated. Here's what that means

This makes creating vaccines more difficult.

[kayaker]

@Stranger_On_A_Train

Yeah, that isn’t remotely ethical, and any challenge of Constitutional protection against “cruel and unusual punishment” would shut that down promptly.

The original question in the OP was a “what if” thing, I was answering along those lines.

[VOW]

@PastTense

https://www.salon.com/2020/05/05/the-coronavirus-has-mutated-heres-what-that-means/

This makes creating vaccines more difficult.

Coronaviruses, which come in many flavors, are notorious for mutating.

The scientists could come up with a perfectly safe vaccine for a specific type of COVID, and all the while the coronavirus is chortling with glee, mutating just beyond the ability of that vaccine.
~VOW

[filmstar-en]

I seem to remember an interview with Professor SARAH GILBERT, Vaccinologist at Oxford University that suggests this Coronvirus mutates a lot, but rarely at the site targeted by vaccines.

19042003.pdf

AM: And are you of the view that this is a single strain of coronavirus, this one, or is it mutating around the world? Are there different strains?

SG: There are some mutations going on. But not at a level that will affect our ability to vaccinate against it. In our mers coronavirus trials we took the serum from people who’d been immunised from their blood and we tested it against lots of different coronaviruses –mers coronaviruses that is –isolated different years from humans and from camels and in different countries, and the serum antibodies worked against all of them, because the differences are really quite minor. So for some viruses, like flu, there’s a lot of change from year to year and between the avian viruses and the human viruses, but the coronaviruses, within one type, such as either mers or sars or novocoronavirus, although it changes a little bit as it passes through people it’s really not very much.

[AK84]

UPDATE

The British it turns out, are proposing exactly that.

Gardeners of the United Kingdom, lock up your sons. :eek:

[Heffalump_and_Roo]

I’m not sure if this is related to the trials in the UK, but there’s a human challenge trial in the US as well. I remember watching some guy explain why he was taking part in it on the news a couple weeks ago.

If vaccine testing could be trimmed by just one day, potentially saving thousands of lives, would you volunteer to be exposed to the COVID-19 virus?

Yes, say a growing number of young, healthy and informed people. In less than a month, more than 3,300 people from 52 nations — including at least two Stanford grads — have signed up to be vaccinated and deliberately exposed to the new virus in a campaign organized by the group 1DaySooner, a willingness that’s caught the attention of legislators, ethicists and scientists.

The effort was launched by Josh Morrison of Brooklyn, New York, a Harvard-educated attorney who founded Waitlist Zero, a nonprofit organization that seeks to ease kidney donation.

By the time I read about it, the number of volunteers was much bigger, something like 16K, IIRC.

There are now over 25K volunteers from over 102 countries. 1day sooner.

[filmstar-en]

Human challenge trials are low risk for young, fit participants. But volunteering to be exposed to the virus if you are older or have existing conditions, that is a different matter and represents a significant risk.

This seems to be the dilemma of these trials. You really want to test vaccines on the most vulnerable but the risks may be unacceptable. So you are back to relying on exposure arising within the community and the more successful the lockdowns and social distancings measures are, the less likley it is that a trial participant is exposed to the virus. If participants are never exposed to the virus during the trial the result of any vaccination would be inconclusive.

To get some prospect of community exposure, the trials require very high numbers of participants and long time frame.

It helps to find a place where Covid-19 is endemic. Where to do this? Exposed communities in countries with poor healthcare, where Covid-19 is probably out of control. We know that care homes for the elderly are particularly exposed.

A few candidate countries come to mind.

But it is not difficult to imagine the politics might be…challenging.