Larissa MacFarquhar on a Potentially Deadly Experiment, and Jelani Cobb on the Killing of Ahmaud Arbery

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 22 May 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Abie Roehrig, a twenty-year-old undergraduate, has put his name on a list of volunteers for a human-challenge trial to test the efficacy of a COVID-19 vaccine. A human-challenge trial for a vaccine would be nearly unprecedented: it would entail giving subjects a candidate vaccine against the virus, and then infecting them deliberately to test its efficacy more quickly than a traditional, safer vaccine trial. Larissa MacFarquhar talks about this highly controversial proposal with the epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch, who supports such trials for COVID-19, and the virologist Angela Rasmussen, who feels that the scientific benefits are too limited to justify the enormous risks. Plus, Jelani Cobb speaks with the legal scholar Ira P. Robbins about the shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery, and why prosecutors declined for months to arrest the white man who killed him. In the Arbery case, Robbins sees a fatal confusion of citizen’s-arrest laws, stand-your-ground doctrine, and racial profiling.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.6	I'm David Remnick, and you're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:13.2	I would like vaccine development to happen as quick as possible, and for that to happen,
0:17.6	there have to be people who are willing to be part of these challenge trials, it seems.
0:21.9	And if that's the case, then, you know, I don't see any good reason why it shouldn't be me.
0:26.9	This is A.B. Rourke. He's 20 years old, an undergraduate, and he's got some news to break to his mother, Elaine.
0:34.0	I know I've talked to you a bit about my involvement with human challenge trials,
0:39.9	or at least my desired involvement with human challenge trials to help speed up the development
0:45.6	of a vaccine for coronavirus.
0:47.6	And that's basically why I want to talk to you is that I would like to volunteer myself
0:52.2	to be part of this trial should it happen.
0:56.3	I'm pretty floored by that. But I think that it just seems like that's a huge risk to take,
1:03.0	especially with just one kidney.
1:06.3	Larissa McFarcker is a staff writer for the New Yorker. Larissa, you talked recently to A.B. Rourke, what's going on here?
1:12.6	AB has volunteered to be a subject in a vaccine trial, a particular kind of high-risk experiment called a human challenge trial.
1:20.6	And his mother is pretty worried about it.
1:23.6	I totally admire and respect your desire to help people.
1:30.2	I just don't know how safe it is.
1:32.0	Right.
1:32.5	But you just had your kidney out in July.
1:34.6	I can't imagine that would be safe.
1:36.4	I mean...
	...

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