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.
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.
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?
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
