Ask HN: Have we made a mistake by not conducting Covid tests on humans?

1 pointsby basketheadhace 5 años4 comments

There is still so much we don't know about COVID that we are simply discerning through statistics instead of hard science. At what point are people contagious? How much virus do we need for someone to get infected by COVID? Why do some people get severe symptoms and others get no symptoms at all? Is there a genetic link? Why do naive immune systems of kids defeat COVID so easily compared to older immune systems?

It seems like if we had controlled environments where we could infect humans and then watch the progression, we could have saved literally millions of lives.

And there are hundreds of thousands of people if not millions who would volunteer for these experiments around the world. We could give them a stipend, maybe $10,000 or $100,000 and direct access to monoclonal antibodies, paxlovid, and the best medical care available. I myself would volunteer under these conditions.

But I think there's probably an ethical reason why we haven't done this. Surely having controlled experiments on volunteers would help us figure out how to stop this disease much, much sooner? Especially given how low the death rate was?

Is there any reason besides ethical why we wouldn't want to test on humans to get a better understanding of COVID?

3 comments

NicoJuicyhace 5 años

A lot of those questions are answered and i don't think first trials have to be in anything but mice, who are very similar in relevant organs.

Eg. Kids have more flexible immune systems, while adults immune systems react how they know. The older => the more inflexible when it encounters something new.

Eg. You are contagious if you have enough particles produced that are transmittable. With omnicron that's ~2 days, symptoms in ~3 days.

Eg. Different variables on why some have it severe ( excluding vaccinations). Health conditions and age are the biggest variables, but there are more, less relevant ones, eg. Vitamine D intake ( they have it to seniors in my country).

Omicron correctly is so contagious that the "test subjects" is analyzing real data on humans in place where outbreaks happen.

This is mostly because it appears to be very light. Also, Corona virus mutates so fast that performing an additional tests could be useless before results can be interpreted.

nojokeshace 5 años

Yes, we could have and we could have deployed vaccines in short months. But we did not because we found it not to be ethical. Letting millions of people die was found much more ethical. Also keeping strict control over vaccine production was found ethical instead of scaling the production into as many countries as possible.

nradovhace 5 años

Oxford is running human challenge trials.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-04-19-human-challenge-trial-l...

nojokeshace 5 años

Still running?

Not sure what has gotten into them. They are also still running https://www.principletrial.org/ to validate favipiravir and ivermectin. They have continued to hire new patients for months. I guessed that there was some urgency to find out if these drugs work or not at all.