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Some scientists are taking a DIY coronavirus vaccine, and nobody knows if it's legal or if it works:
Preston Estep was alone in a borrowed laboratory, somewhere in Boston. No big company, no board meetings, no billion-dollar payout from Operation Warp Speed, the US government's covid-19 vaccine funding program. No animal data. No ethics approval.
What he did have: ingredients for a vaccine. And one willing volunteer.
Estep swirled together the mixture and spritzed it up his nose.
Nearly 200 covid-19 vaccines are in development and some three dozen are at various stages of human testing. But in what appears to be the first "citizen science" vaccine initiative, Estep and at least 20 other researchers, technologists, or science enthusiasts, many connected to Harvard University and MIT, have volunteered as lab rats for a do-it-yourself inoculation against the coronavirus. They say it's their only chance to become immune without waiting a year or more for a vaccine to be formally approved.
Among those who've taken the DIY vaccine is George Church, the celebrity geneticist at Harvard University, who took two doses a week apart earlier this month. The doses were dropped in his mailbox and he mixed the ingredients himself.
Church believes the vaccine designed by Estep, his former graduate student at Harvard and one of his proteges, is extremely safe. "I think we are at much bigger risk from covid considering how many ways you can get it, and how highly variable the consequences are," says Church, who says he has not stepped outside of his house in five months. The US Centers for Disease Control recently reported that as many as one-third of patients who test positive for covid-19 but are never hospitalized battle symptoms for weeks or even months after contracting the virus. "I think that people are highly underestimating this disease," Church says.
Harmless as the experimental vaccine may be, though, whether it will protect anyone who takes it is another question. And the independent researchers who are making and sharing it might be stepping onto thin legal ice, if they aren't there already.
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:55PM (1 child)
Everyone wants to be the guinea pig who gets the unlicenced cure. But who will step up to be injected with the virus to prove effectiveness?
Actually, how does the even work? Would not a double blind test for a vaccine imply that some unprotected people would need to get injected with the virus to provide a baseline of effectiveness?
Or do they just give some people the vaccine, and others saline solution, let them go into the wild and see which ones contract the virus?
(Score: 2) by Booga1 on Thursday July 30 2020, @03:34PM
This "study" they're doing is too small to have double blind tests and placebo treatments. Even with large trials some diseases are so serious that it's considered unethical to give placebos.
On top of that, immunity isn't always a black and white thing that just works or doesn't. Sometimes immune responses can be sufficient to prevent infection from incidental contact, but repeated exposures or exposure to high concentrations of pathogens can overwhelm it.
Because of that, I'd expect they won't be going out and doing everything they can to be infected. It makes more sense to just "act natural" and see how things work out. I suspect these self-administered vaccines will only be good enough to say "this is interesting and worth further study" or "what a failure, guess it's back to the drawing board."