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.