SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @04:17AM (1 child)
Sounds like someone who has no idea what they are talking about would type into the internet.
t0: Do not have antibodies
t1: take vaccine
t2: Have antibodies
Either it was the vaccine or you got exposed somehow else. So stay home between t1 and t2.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 31 2020, @08:50PM
Or you were exposed before t0 and developed immunity even though the vaccine was no help. Or you were already immune at t0 but the false negative said otherwise. Or you were exposed despite staying at home and developed immunity that way. Or the t2 test was a false positive. Or the reporting was incorrect. Or you were exposed in the vaccine but not its antigen payload. Or you could have antibodies but not enough for an immune response. Or a number of other things.
Like I said, there are tons of confounding variables and you don't have the sample sizes or probabilities necessary to discern those things, which is why this design isn't close to being a proper repeated-measure N-of-1 trial.