Main Edition
US
FR
September 24, 2020 - 11:55am
I’m a subject in the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid vaccine trial (As I keep on droning on about). It seems to be progressing well, insofar as I can tell as Guinea Pig #9385. And other vaccine candidates are also coming along — Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine has entered phase 3 trials, the fourth to do so.
There is a real and significant problem for developing vaccines, though, which is that not very many people have the disease. That sounds like a good thing — it is a good thing — but if you’re testing a vaccine, it’s a problem.
Here’s why. In Oxford’s case, they’ve given 5,000ish people the real vaccine and 5,000 a control. Then they watch to see whether the real-vaccine group gets Covid less than the control group. But if the disease is very rare, you’ll hardly see any cases in either group, so it’ll be really hard to compare; I go into the issues in more detail here. Oxford is running trials in other countries, such as Brazil, where the prevalence is higher, but it’s a real problem.
In animal trials, of course, scientists deliberately infect (“challenge”) the animals with the virus, to see if the vaccine protects them. In general, that’s frowned upon in human studies: infecting people with a dangerous disease, knowing that half of them will not even have the protection of the vaccine and that the vaccine may not work anyway, is high-risk and usually vetoed by ethics boards. But a few people, notably the group 1DaySooner, have been arguing that the current circumstances demand it, and that under carefully controlled conditions for fit and healthy volunteers, the risks are acceptable.
Now the FT is reporting that 2,000 volunteers recruited through 1DaySooner are going ahead with these “human challenge” trials in London, under the auspices of Imperial College London, another team working to develop a vaccine.
Full disclosure: I signed up with 1DaySooner back in June, but by the time they got back to me I was on the Oxford trial, and under the Oxford terms I’m no longer allowed to take part. But it seems a good idea to me. The risk of death to reasonably young, healthy people is enormously low; the risk of medium — or even long-term — health consequences are higher.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe