| > We also could have invested single digit billions early on to build capacity for all of these different potential vaccines As of the end of October, the U.S. had invested $18 billion to "build capacity," mainly by making advance purchases of vaccines that had yet to be produced (and had yet to pass clinical trials). See [1]. But maybe you're thinking of building capacity in a different way. > We refused to risk any individual life in order to potentially save hundreds of thousands or more. This is such an important point. In particular, human challenge trials, in which healthy, low-risk volunteers are infected with a low dose of the virus, could have saved tens of thousands of lives -- at a minimum -- in the U.S. alone. The case for HCTs, including the ethical case, is taken up in [2]. In a comment below, someone likens HCTs to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study. The comparison isn't apt. In the Tuskegee study, people infected with syphilis were promised medical care that they were later denied. When they were diagnosed with syphilis, they weren't even told of the diagnosis. Those conditions are a world apart from the HCTs that Eyal et al. propose in [2].
- - - - - [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-10-29/inside-op... [2] https://academic.oup.com/jid/article/221/11/1752/5814216 |