You keep making assumption after assumption that if strange finding (e.g. antibody+) is obtained from a vaccine trial placebo group, it will be impossible to isolate the cause, impossible to interpret the meaning, and it will somehow ruin the study or at least be completely useless. Your argument is becoming more and more bizarre with these artificial assumptions which has no base in reality, in reality investigating unexpected data is part of a researcher's work and sometimes key to new discoveries. This is not just in the textbooks, but in actual human clinical trials out there, setting up a placebo control whenever feasible IS the gold standard of clinical trial design.
By the way it's not just the unexpected data that's useful, normal "expected" data from placebo control is also important in the statistical analysis of physiological reactions, as I have explained several posts ago. The point seems lost behind all your focus on "what if antibody+ found in placebo group".
Your argument about time is also irrelevant in regards to placebo control, because a vaccine trial is usually doing parallel RCT.
Basically, I feel that with a virus like COVID-19, having a control group is not being fair to the control group. Someone could be infected during the 1 year study and suffer serious long term consequences, give it to his/her family or even die, which might have been prevented by putting them in the vaccine group. But then again, you're not really doing them any more harm than not selecting them for the study so I guess it's not that bad. For complete scientific data, a control group is better than not having one, but I think unless there are grievous problems, the data obtained from just the vaccine group is good enough since normally, you're not expecting to learn anything from the control group anyway. As you said, science is just clues, so some imperfection in data is acceptable, in my opinion, to prevent giving a placebo to hundreds of people (when you have something that very well might work) and sending them out to a COVID-19 infested environment.
You think everything should be done by the books and I think this is a special case that would be unfair to the placebo group to do it that way. I don't think we're going to make any headway so this is my last post on that.
It's the same.
A risk can be taken if the gain is worthwhile. If a vaccine can be reliably and safely validated by just exposing 30-ish people to COVID-19 and studying them for 2 months, you may argue that the gain is worthwhile and that ethical committee should approve.
The problem is, a vaccine can't be reliably and safely validated like that, thus I believe no ethics committee should approve actively infecting people with COVID-19.
I never said "no ethics committee would or should approve human challenge trials", because human challenge trials could be conducted with adapted or attenuated pathogens instead of the original one, and it might be ethical that way. So don't put words in my mouth please.
Sorry, I meant that you said that no ethics committee would or should approve human challenge trials with COVID-19. Now if there is something proven to be immunological the same as COVID-19 but with greatly attenuated virulence, that would be ideal; actually, that would be a vaccine LOL. But, if we cannot find something safer to challenge with, I stand by my course that the current COVID-19 is safe enough in young healthy individuals to do a 2 month challenge trial in bio-containment. The risks have to be weighed against the rewards. And while you might think it's crazy, some renowned experts do not, so let's not say that no ethics committee would or should approve; it's just that no ethics committee
chaired by you would approve.
From the article by localizer (do check out the link as well):
"Stanley Plotkin of the University of Pennsylvania, inventor of the current rubella vaccine and a leader in the vaccine field, says a carefully designed “human challenge” trial could offer clear proof of a vaccine’s worth at blinding speed. “We’re talking 2, 3 months,” says Plotkin, who has co-authored a commentary, now being submitted for publication, that describes how this might be ethically done. “People who are faced with a terrifying problem like this one will opt for measures that are unusual. And we have to constantly rethink our biases.” A similar proposal for coronavirus challenge studies was published
. "
