Daniel Griffin provides a clinical report on COVID-19, Slovlakia’s plan to test all adults for SARS-CoV-2 infection, viral variants arising in Danish mink and their potential threat to humans, why it is unethical to carry out challenge trials, Nipah virus dynamics in bats and spillovers into humans, and direct cardiac damage by spike-mediated cardiomyocyte fusion.
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It is absolutely unethical NOT to do challenge trials using front line medical personnel! They have the highest infection and death rates because of massive exposure when admitting, caring for, and intubating patients. The PPE to provide adequate protection is simply fiction. There is no excuse for not providing such personnel with early access vaccines. This bleating over, “But we have to prove efficacy!” is just malarkey. All of these vaccines will work. None of the designs can create disease. There is no scenario in which it makes the slightest sense to not provide vaccines to people we know are highly exposed. That position is quite insane.
Similarly, An intentional challenge group, perhaps is unethical if you predicate the assumption that the vaccines probably won’t work. And that’s just not a valid assumption, which makes the ethics discussion invalid. A group of us collaborated on a DNA vaccine in January and administered it to the group of self-experimenters in March. The physicians were all protected. The physician who could have, but turned it down, and did the same high-risk duty nearly died, and after 3 months on ECMO received a heart-lung transplant.