The Ethics of Human Challenge Trials for COVID-19

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The vaccines that are currently being developed I guess is Moderna and Pfizer, they actually produced these vaccines for the first time back in January. There was this ongoing debate about whether it would be morally acceptable to do a human challenge trial to test these vaccines. So over the last year, we've had several million people die of COVID-19. We could probably get a pretty good signal about whether these vaccines work within a month by testing maybe 100 people with each of these vaccine candidates. It would speed up potentially the discovery of which vaccines are effective by three or four months.

What are the best strategies for improving ourselves? How are line managers useful? Why does Rob prefer long-form content for the 80,000 Hours podcast? What are the sorts of things humans value and why? In what ways do research ethics considerations fail to achieve their stated objectives? Why are prediction markets useful?

Rob Wiblin is the Head of Research at 80,000 Hours where he investigates how people can do more good in the course of their career and produces a long-form interview show called the 80,000 Hours Podcast. He studied genetics and economics in Australia before moving to the UK to help develop the emerging field of effective altruism. You can learn more about Rob at robwiblin.com, learn more about his research work at 80000hours.org, and follow him on social media at @robertwiblin.

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