
Coronavirus: Would you volunteer to be exposed? These Stanford grads did - elsewhen
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/04/25/coronavirus-would-you-volunteer-to-be-exposed-these-stanford-grads-did/
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q084yn39cptyth
I would but I have a young child and spouse. It's not even so much the risk of
serious medical complications for me, it's the complications involved in
isolating myself, if that were even possible. It's one thing to increase your
risk of exposure with a family; it's another to deliberately infect yourself.
Definitely not saying it's morally wrong necessarily, just that I haven't
quite figured out a way to do it in which my family would feel ok with it or
understand.

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benjaminclark
I volunteered yesterday after seeing this article. To be clear, this is a very
early expression of interest and there is no specific human challenge trial
which is ready to begin at this time. Consequently, the exact trial
implementation details are to be determined.

That said, I would be shocked if any such trial didn't involve the isolation
of subjects in provided accommodations for the full duration of the study. It
would be necessary on ethical grounds for the purpose of community safety.
Obviously, that doesn't mean you should volunteer (it is still a risk to your
health and extended isolation from your family would suck), but they aren't
just going to infect you and then send you home to come back in a few weeks.

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JohnDeHope
This is a no-brainer. I am a health 46 year old male. I have a living will, do
not resuscitate order, all my organs are to be donated, and the leftovers will
go to my local medical college. If it were a part of a well organized medical
study whose findings would be accessible or open source in some way (aka not
for a pharmaceutical or university's own profit) then I'd gladly get be
exposed. Where do I sign up?

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plerpin
Hats off to them.

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mchusma
I saw this on Reddit and volunteered immediately.

It is an ethical no-brainer, with the one caveat that the study is run well.

I am not sure about this article though. It focuses on these young biologists
who like me have not actually done anything yet, and suggests low volunteer
numbers.

Thinking of this as a fringe thing may undermine the effort. I think you would
likely get on the order of 10M-100M global volunteers for something like this
from all walks of life, and it's so obvious that it's worth considering that
it just reads wrong to me.

My impression from listening to the CEO of Moderna and others that most people
are more worried about the safety of the vaccine and the speed to ramp up
manufacturing, not the efficacy. (Source:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvYiuoJ_lrI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvYiuoJ_lrI))

So while saving even 1 month makes an enormous difference, I am unsure how
much human challenge studies change the timeline of an actual vaccine.

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londons_explore
"Volunteer" shouldn't be the word here.

It should be "paid".

If the pay was $10k per participant, the world would happily pay 100 people
for each of 10 vaccine trials.

The people would understand the risk they were taking and be happy that the
$10k was worth it for them. Countries would be happy that the payment was good
value for money for finding a vaccine for their population.

"Volunteering" is in my mind ethically wrong - you are paying people in
'goodwill', which doesn't and shouldn't cover the risk satisfactorily.

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ratacat
This 100%! The companies sure as hell aren't "volunteering" to make the
vaccines.

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rudolph9
This is really inspiring.

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balnaphone
Exposed to SARS-CoV-2? Absolutely, no problem.

Exposed to god-knows-what in their untested vaccine? Absolutely not, even five
years after release ("my body, my choice"). There is a long history of
contaminants in biologics, and vaccines in particular. Problems like GBS
(Guillain-Barre Syndrome), tumors, polio, and who knows what from PCV. If I
recall correctly, wasn't SV-40 injected into 25 million Americans, and perhaps
hundreds of millions world-wide? Well-tested and analyzed vaccines like BCG I
have no problem with, but being a guinea pig for whatever was cooked up in a
rush over the last few weeks? Count me out.

The headline has it backwards -- the more significant (unbounded) risk is from
the therapy, not the SARS-CoV-2 exposure.

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bennyelv
It sounds to me like your risk assessment is a little unbalanced.

We also have no idea what the medium and long term effects of being infected
with SARS-CoV-2 are, so why are you happy to be exposed to it?

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balnaphone
Because coming from a natural source, namely other people, I can estimate risk
probabilities for a range of outcomes, in the short term. Highly pathogenic
viruses in general have a tendency to become attenuated as they spread, due to
evolutionary pressure. In the medium and long terms, there are two main
benefits to the virus versus an experimental vaccine. One is that there are no
known long-term effects (aside from scarring) from other closely-related
viruses, and two is that because tens of millions (or more) of other people
have been (or will be) infected by it, there is enough of a population for
serious focus and work to be done on dealing with it. Lastly, it isn't
unreasonable to assume that practically everyone will be exposed to it anyway.

Vaccines, on the other hand, especially experimental ones, have been
historically known to suffer from contamination (biological or otherwise), and
result in strange, hard-to-diagnose problems. These problems are suffered by a
tiny population (the experimental group), with no broad societal, medical, or
research support -- which makes sense, since the highest societal priority is
typically to help as many people as possible. The three main concerns with the
vaccines themselves are that (a) there's no biological pressure to attenuate
negative effects, (b) the biologic components themselves may infect the
patient, without any point of comparison commensurate with widespread viruses
in the field, and (c) the other ingredients (stabilizers, preservatives, etc.)
in vaccines are often toxic in their own right. In the past it has taken many
years, even a decade or more, to get it all right.

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balnaphone
As a footnote, I came across a couple interesting papers on the topic of
vaccine contamination from around 2012. They talk about the usual development
time being 8-10 years, and about a few recent cases of vaccine contamination.

Extraneous agent detection in vaccines:
[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Attila_Farsang_Dr/publi...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Attila_Farsang_Dr/publication/224939093_Extraneous_agent_detection_in_vaccines_-
_A_review_of_technical_aspects/links/59ea4ba2aca272cddddb7cce/Extraneous-
agent-detection-in-vaccines-A-review-of-technical-aspects.pdf)

Detection of Avian Retroviruses in Vaccines:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3647912/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3647912/)

