>Some scientists are self-administering an untested product. Is that legal?

There are many things that it's illegal to cook up in a lab and inject into yourself, including many where the act of cooking it isn't the problem, it's the injection.

"Legal" and "ethical" are not synonymous.

> "Legal" and "ethical" are not synonymous.

I'm not sure anyone in this thread is confused on that point. The parent appears to be responding to this section of the grandparent:

> > Some scientists are self-administering an untested product. Is that legal?

> Yes, of course. Obviously.

>"Legal" and "ethical" are not synonymous.

The GP and the OP ask both questions. I was specifically replying to the GP's claim that it's obvious that it is legal.

I would say its borderline unethical in the sense of self-promotion and pushing the scientific career.

The comment about scientists self-administering reminded me of Barry Marshall drinking a vial of H. Pylori

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall

That is covered in the article.

Is that at all obvious? Suppose there are serious side effects and the scientist loses his arm. You bet that people will say it was unethical by the lab provider to let them try.

I mean, there's plenty of recreational activities where the participant has a pretty good chance of losing their arm or worse. Nobody seems to argue about the legality, let alone the ethics of BASE jumping, wingsuiting, free solo climbing, or technical diving.

And unlike scientific experimentation, these don't even come with any sort of broader social benefit. We let consenting adults mix wildly speculative breathing gasses so they can dive 500 feet underwater. Pretty much for no other reason than it's cool. Why not let scientists do the same if it might cure a pandemic that's killed millions?

free solo climbing in the office building?

The point is that the university is providing equipment and allows this to take place in their labs.

> Why not let scientists be the leaders of our new meritocratic fascist regime?

Yup, it looks like a clear case of Scientist-itis to me. I had seen that before. Too much superhero histories.

Why would want the scientists to take part into such creepy thing? Do you really thing that they are so weird and creepy?

Sec.. Let me just slice up, dissect, and pin this frog's guts neatly and artistically outside it's dead body.

Now, you were saying something about weird and creepy? There's nothing creepy and weird about eugenics, fascism, nor meritocracy. Eugenics was widely accepted well before the "not-see" perversion as a way to better humanity.

You know what's really creepy? Stories and thier Storytellers. Facts/Truth, never creepy. Stories, always creepy.

> Let me just slice up, dissect, and pin this frog's guts neatly and artistically outside it's dead body.

Or we could ban the study of amphibian malformations and diseases by ideological reasons, and cry for all the frog species in the planet that will go extinct by ranavirus in the next five years. All because we didn't have galls to dissect a small dead animal and do something about it.

Would you prefer that, maybe?

Wait, that's a huge leap from allowing scientists to experiment with their own, personal bodies, and a fascist eugenicist technocratic regime.

If you wait too long, it won't be cool anymore.

One view of this is that the question ought to be whether or not those people are right in assigning blame to anyone. If the scientist is fully aware of the risk and willing to use himself as a test subject, it's hard to argue that there is any blame to go around.

But what if the scientist feels pressured to provide results and cuts corners to get those results. That may be something intagible but still have an effect on the decisions he/she makes. It would be next to impossible to prove that and in term protect the person, so the only way would be to outright ban such tests.

But what if all scientists feel pressured to do the same, in an effort to win relevance?

.... what if .... entire nations feel pressured to do the same, not wait for trials, just proclaim victory on a hunch... like Russia?

> .... what if .... entire nations feel pressured to do the same, not wait for trials, just proclaim victory on a hunch... like Russia?

Funny for you to say that right now...

https://nypost.com/2020/08/31/fda-willing-to-fast-track-covi...

But it does make perfect sense -- if at some point a certain category was shown to have a very high projected morbidity rate -- say the overweight elderly with diabetes -- you could approve the medicine just for that group if it was deemed better than just letting those people die.

Just like you give amphetamine salts to people with ADHD and not to the general population -- because the benefits outweigh the risks for that particular population.

But scientists are not in that category. I don't event want to get into the legalities of self-administering a vaccine not yet marketed -- shouldn't you pay an astronomical price for it?

Sort of like how spinraza costs 2$ million because there are so few patients and you have to split the development cost among them, if you self-administer a vaccine before mass marketing, perhaps you should pay the development costs out of your own pocket?

I'm not really criticizing the policy, mostly because there is no policy there to criticize. There was a political outcry accusing the US government of bottlenecking treatments, so an agency makes a public statement saying they are willing to take risks.

The actual content of the statement has nothing actionable in it, so it can never be an issue. The fact that the agency is reacting to some plain-Earth level nut outcry is an issue.

And, yeah, of course, nothing really happened there, at least yet. Nothing did happen on Russia either, again, at least yet. It all just makes for a funny comment with really interesting timing.

In a vacuum perhaps. But in real life, the scientist ends up making insurance claims when the self-administered vaccine goes wrong.

in the US, this would be insurance that the scientist (and/or their emloyer) pays for. if enough scientists perform risky experiments that it meaningfully increases payouts, I'm sure the insurer could figure out a way to account for that in the premiums.

in short: who cares?

Dis you actually read the article? It sets out some real world ethical problems in terms of reproducibility of results and wasted effort as well as issues of recommending vaccinations to third parties that haven't undergone rigorous double-blind trials.

Yes; I wish commenters would actually debate the point of the article.

FYI: 12 Monkeys was not a documentary.

Surely you see the difference between developing and giving yourself a coronavirus vaccine, and engineering a new smallpox virus.

Anyone can screw up, trained professionals in every field make mistakes.

That's quite the sensationalist take.

How did you travel from "doctors self injecting a covid vaccine" to "doctors may accidentally wipe out humanity?"

An incomplete vaccine can apply evolutionary pressure on the virus. From my understanding that's probably not so likely if just a few scientists use their own vaccine (someone more knowledgeable please correct me if I'm wrong), but may be a valid concern regarding some countries rushing through vaccines that have had limited testing. (eg. the Russia example)

I'm just repeating what I've heard, as I don't have specialist knowledge of this area, but one logical problem that occurred to me about this was whether the breadth of coverage of a vaccine is even testable. I would love to know how that gets tested in trials, because what I've heard about how vaccines are assessed has sounded a lot more primitive than anything that would indicate breadth of immunity.

A dozen or so scientists trialing a vaccine on themselves is of zero concern. And you can't take this one-off self-trialing and apply the same level of scrutiny to a government actor acting on millions of people.

Makes sense.

The bureaucracy is so complicated that the scientists have to test their vaccines on themselves to get a quick result. I don't think that's ethical, and I don't think that's good for science either. I don't think we want those things to happen.

>Some scientists are self-administering an untested product. Is it ethical?

Depends, if the self-administering scientist is the only person at risk then I don't see any reason to believe it is not ethical. Assuming they are adult, sane persons it is ethical to take personal risk, at least in my book. Now, depending on what is being injected you could imagine a situation where this could pose risk to other people as well - for example a vaccination containing an active virus (through a design or mistake) that could spread outside the lab and infect others. This would NOT be ethical.

tldr: if the self-administering person does not put anyone else at risk it should be considered ethical

What if they are a well educated, critical scientist who loses their life to the untested vaccine? The world may be missing out on decades of their future work. If they have a family who has to mourn their passing?

Not saying that makes it unethical, but the calculus is more complex than just whether they put others in direct risk.

is the world entitled to the future work of a bright mind, before it is even done? imo, this is a worrying line of thought if you follow the thread further.

This is not ethical, regardless!

It creates a precedent and expectation from other scientists to do the same, which, down the road will lead to laxed testing standards in the future -- this isn't the wild west!

What does self administering a vaccine actually accomplished in the end?

Guys, read the article, they are not doing it to speed things up for everybody, they are doing it because they think their survival of the pandemic is a net positive for science!

In terms of ethics, practically every religion and system of ethics in the past has defined deliberately putting oneself in harms way to benefit others as the one of the most ethical acts: “No greater love has any man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”

So if “ethicists” are questioning this, it says more about the “ethicists” beliefs and prejudices, than about the ethics.

But that is only partially correct -- the italian priest who refused a ventilator in order for a younger guy to get it, yeah, he fits the bill 100%.

The scientist who self administers that vaccine... in order to what exactly, I'm not sure, but it is hinted in the article -- to survive the pandemic -- yeah, those are completely different things, apples to oranges.