The british army tested nerve agents on un-knowing Army recruits and accidentally killed people.

The Australian army tested anti-malarials with good intent and caused huge mental harms (they are pretty psychologically active and can trigger suicide ideation)

The US army has form for testing on recruits without adequate consent or information

Overall, the whole "for the good of humanity" story here is that the consent is weak, the support is weak, the costs are not borne equally. I would not advise any young person to be guilt-tripped into volunteering for this.

The track record here is very poor

No one is talking about anything else than consenting, fully informed adults participating.

Except these things have a habit of not being what anyone is "talking about" but about what they actually do.

That's a false equivalence. We are not talking about not testing vaccines at all or not, but how.

You are simply ignoring the responsibility of the vaccine maker of potentially not going through the adequate steps.

A better equivalence would be the question, how should your hypothetical army be equipped and trained. And would the people doing/deciding that be responsible for the choices made. I would understand you saying, it doesn't matter we are under attack.

No, a better equivalence would be how long you let the invading army plunder before you start handing out spears and shields, because if you wait another month the shields might work better.

That metaphor sounds nice but conjurs the wrong image. The vaccine could very well be worse than a Covid infection, i.e. you grab your shield, but that newsly invented shield has spikes on the inside.

> A better equivalence would be the question, how should your hypothetical army be equipped and trained.

Agreed. And if standard training takes 12 months and you're being invaded now, what do you do?

Hunker down and hide from the invading army until enough of them go home that it's possible to capture and isolate the remainder?

IMO, institutional review boards in charge of trials would not let this pass, for a good reason. Especially because you can't (obviously) use a control group.

It's different from a phase 1 study when you are testing on healthy volounteers. This would mean deliberately infecting people with a largely unknown virus after vaccination with a vaccine whose efficacy is still not yet determined fully (in fact, it would be to determine its efficacy).

Oh yes you can use a control group. I would volunteer for such a trial if success would mean approval of a vaccine.

Of course it involves some risk. But the alternative is that millions of others, many older and with compromised immune systems, would get the virus involuntarily because the vaccine trials took longer to run. Is it ethical to ban research that saves thousands of lives?

You don’t know that the research will save thousands of lives, or kill thousands, until it’s done.

What proportion of vaccine trials are successful usually? Could the probability of efficacy be estimated and used to judge if the study goes ahead?

There needs to be a reasonable amount of risk taken in research, otherwise we will find it impossible to make progress.

We should just use prisoners as the test subjects. Leave it up to and IRB and they will sit on it until we’re all dead...

If you ask under-40y/o non-violent offenders with >10yr sentence and say a $10k payout and guaranteed presidential pardon upon completion of the trial I’m sure there would be some takers.

Yes that’s crazy and I do know the governments history of shady vaccine testing, but we are facing a pandemic and each day sooner that we have a vaccine will be many lives saved.

There was an early experiment with variolation tried on someone sentenced to death, where he agreed to be variolated, then challenged with smallpox infection. his sentence was commuted after he survived.

the highest-profile prison experiments in the US were Project MKUltra, in which prisoners were injected with high doses of LSD, the Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study, and some experiments with radioactive isotopes.

offering prisoners their freedom in exchange for participating in dangerous or harmful trials was widely viewed as coercive, and contrary to the Nuremberg code of medical voluntary consent established after the horrors of Nazi experimentation.

why should it be better to use prisoners than young, healthy volunteers? are their lives cheaper and expendible because they committed non-violent offenses? no IRB would sign off on that, and if you're bypassing IRBs anyway just use young people who think they're invincible..

That seems to raise more ethical questions than just letting willing volunteers do it.