To Test a Vaccine for COVID-19, Should Volunteers Risk Their Lives?
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 25 May 2020
⏱️ 19 minutes
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Summary
When he was eighteen, Abie Rohrig decided that he wanted to donate a kidney to save the life of a stranger who needed it. At twenty, he put his name on a list of volunteers for a human-challenge trial that would 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. The side effects would be largely unknown, and the viral infection could be deadly. But, if successful, this experiment could shave months off of the process of vaccine development and save countless lives. In a conversation with his mother, Elaine Perlman, Rohrig points out that many occupations involve taking on risks to help others. But how much risk is too much? Larissa MacFarquhar, who has written extensively about altruism, talks with Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist who co-authored a journal article calling for human-challenge trials, and Angela Rasmussen, a virologist who feels that SARS{: .small}-CoV2 is too unknown for any volunteer to meaningfully give informed consent about its risks.
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| 0:50.2 | On today's Politics and More podcast, the New Yorker's Larissa McFarker reports on the controversy over proposed human challenge trials, which might expedite development of a COVID-19 vaccine. |
| 1:06.1 | I would like vaccine development to happen as quick as possible. |
| 1:09.8 | And for that to happen, there have to be |
| 1:11.5 | people who are willing to be part of these challenged trials, it seems. And if that's the case, |
| 1:16.6 | then, you know, I don't see any good reason why it shouldn't be me. This is A.B. Rourick. He's 20 |
| 1:22.4 | years old, an undergraduate, and he's got some news to break to his mother, Elaine. I know I've talked to you a bit about my involvement with human challenge trials, |
| 1:33.3 | or at least my desired involvement with human challenge trials, |
| 1:36.4 | to help speed up the development of a vaccine for coronavirus. |
| 1:40.9 | And that's basically why I want to talk to you is that I would like to volunteer |
| 1:45.1 | myself to be part of this trial should it happen. I'm pretty floored by that. But I think that |
| 1:52.3 | it just seems like that's a huge risk to take, especially with just one kidney. |
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