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Questionable herpes vaccine research backed by tech heavyweight Peter Thiel may have jeopardized $15 million in federal research funding to Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. That's according to documents obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request by The State Journal Register.
In August, Kaiser Health News reported that Thiel and other conservative investors had contributed $7 million for the live-but-weakened herpes virus vaccine, developed by the late SIU researcher William Halford. The investments came after Halford and his private company, Rational Vaccines, had begun conducting small clinical trials in the Caribbean nation of St. Kitts and Nevis. With the off-shore location, Rational Vaccines' trial skirted federal regulations and standard safety protocols for human trials, including having approval and oversight from an institutional review board (IRB).
Experts were quick to call the unapproved trial "patently unethical," and researchers rejected the data from publication, calling the handling of safety issues "reckless." The government of St. Kitts opened an investigation into the trial and reported that health authorities there had been kept in the dark.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday November 17 2017, @10:27AM
An earlier poster has already Godwin'd this thread, so I'll point out that research from concentration camps is probably the canonical (though far more exteme) example of when this has happened before. Most of the medical community refused to use any of the results (it turns out you can get quite a lot of information about biology if you don't care if your subjects die / suffer excruciating pain). The reasoning was twofold: first, they didn't want to provide a justification for war criminals to claim that their work had saved more lives than it had harmed. Second, they didn't want to encourage people to repeat these atrocities in the future.
Ethics aside, there's another, more pragmatic, argument for ignoring this data. In recent years, pharmaceutical companies have been caught cherry picking trials. It's a variation of an old stock-market scam that goes as follows: You set up 20 trials comparing an ineffective drug against a placebo. As a result of random statistical variation, the drug will perform better than the placebo in some and worse in others. You quietly forget about the ones where it performed worse and publish the ones where it performed better. As a result of this, the FDA now requires that all drug trials be registered before they take place, including a lot of information about the participants and so on. It sounds as if this trial didn't do any of this, so the results are highly suspect.
sudo mod me up