No one said anything about a clinical trial. Emphasis added:
I could not find one research study using any of the peptides in the RADVAC white paper that found they inhibited SARS-CoV-2 infection in cells,
Researching the effects in cells requires no IRB approval and publishing the results of that research as a publicly-accessible preprint is not hard. This should be fairly easy to do, for someone with access to a good lab, personal-scale funding, and motivation. I have to assume that Church et. al. have the first two, so either they don’t care enough to bother, or they did but the results weren’t encouraging (and either kept quiet or just unnoticed). Neither is what I’d call a ‘good sign’.
Agree neither Sarah or you had explicitly mentioned a clinical trial. I was pushing back more against Sarah’s statement “Take a random peptide that has never been tested on any living thing” and your statement “She doesn’t explicitly state that this has never been tested on any living thing”, which I interpreted as endorsing the claim that this vaccine has never been tested on any living thing. My point is that there is evidence this vaccine has been tested in living things, namely the humans who claim to have self administered it. I have no strong reason to doubt they have done so, and I haven’t seen any reports of harm coming to these individuals as a result (although admittedly I have no idea if such reports would be publicly available). When I mentioned clinical trials, I was trying to think of what evidence might convince Sarah this approach is not as risky as she fears, and a clinical trial was the first thing that came to mind.
This should be fairly easy to do, for someone with access to a good lab, personal-scale funding, and motivation. I have to assume that Church et. al. have the first two, so either they don’t care enough to bother, or they did but the results weren’t encouraging (and either kept quiet or just unnoticed).
Agree they almost certainly have the first two, but I don’t see why they would have had motivation to perform the kind of cell-based studies you are looking for. Here is how I imagine their motivation and incentives throughout the last year, mostly drawn from the article I linked above and info from the radvac website:
They see Covid is becoming a pandemic, estimate that a commercial vaccine is >1 year away, and wonder if they can develop an open source vaccine that will provide some level of protection more quickly. At this point, their strongest motivation is to develop a vaccine for their own personal use.
They design the radvac vaccine, and based on their personal and collective understanding of vaccines, biochemistry, immunology, etc., each individual decides it is in their personal best interest to self administer the vaccine.
They are torn between competing desires to make their protocol and the underlying research public, and to avoid unnecessary attention from regulatory authorities. From the article:
Given the international attention on covid-19 vaccines, and the high political stakes surrounding the crisis, the Radvac group could nevertheless find itself under scrutiny by regulators. “What the FDA really wants to crack down on is anything big, which makes claims, or makes money. And this is none of those,” says Church. “As soon as we do any of those things, they would justifiably crack down. Also, things that get attention. But we haven’t had any so far.”
Therefore they settle on the strategy of publishing the white paper under the radar, so it is publicly available but attracts as little attention as possible. (With great success I might add, since we are only having this discussion 6 months later!)
Each individual has already made the decision to self administer based on their personal risk-benefit analysis, without the need for cell-based studies.
Publishing additional cell-based studies could increase the chance of drawing unwanted regulatory attention to their effort.
Thus, they don’t have strong incentives to carry out any cell-based studies (which would also take time and effort away from higher priority things they might work on instead), and they likely do have incentives to avoid publishing any cell-based studies.
Which leaves us in the current equilibrium where there are no published cell-based studies.
I think your claim that “they don’t care enough to bother” is not very accurate, and a consideration of their incentives as I outlined above provides an alternative reason why we might not expect to find any published cell-based studies.
At the end of the day, we all still have to make personal decisions based on the information at our disposal, as incomplete or challenging to interpret as it may be.
Happy to hear any additional thoughts on this topic!
No one said anything about a clinical trial. Emphasis added:
Researching the effects in cells requires no IRB approval and publishing the results of that research as a publicly-accessible preprint is not hard. This should be fairly easy to do, for someone with access to a good lab, personal-scale funding, and motivation. I have to assume that Church et. al. have the first two, so either they don’t care enough to bother, or they did but the results weren’t encouraging (and either kept quiet or just unnoticed). Neither is what I’d call a ‘good sign’.
Agree neither Sarah or you had explicitly mentioned a clinical trial. I was pushing back more against Sarah’s statement “Take a random peptide that has never been tested on any living thing” and your statement “She doesn’t explicitly state that this has never been tested on any living thing”, which I interpreted as endorsing the claim that this vaccine has never been tested on any living thing. My point is that there is evidence this vaccine has been tested in living things, namely the humans who claim to have self administered it. I have no strong reason to doubt they have done so, and I haven’t seen any reports of harm coming to these individuals as a result (although admittedly I have no idea if such reports would be publicly available). When I mentioned clinical trials, I was trying to think of what evidence might convince Sarah this approach is not as risky as she fears, and a clinical trial was the first thing that came to mind.
Agree they almost certainly have the first two, but I don’t see why they would have had motivation to perform the kind of cell-based studies you are looking for. Here is how I imagine their motivation and incentives throughout the last year, mostly drawn from the article I linked above and info from the radvac website:
They see Covid is becoming a pandemic, estimate that a commercial vaccine is >1 year away, and wonder if they can develop an open source vaccine that will provide some level of protection more quickly. At this point, their strongest motivation is to develop a vaccine for their own personal use.
They design the radvac vaccine, and based on their personal and collective understanding of vaccines, biochemistry, immunology, etc., each individual decides it is in their personal best interest to self administer the vaccine.
They are torn between competing desires to make their protocol and the underlying research public, and to avoid unnecessary attention from regulatory authorities. From the article:
Therefore they settle on the strategy of publishing the white paper under the radar, so it is publicly available but attracts as little attention as possible. (With great success I might add, since we are only having this discussion 6 months later!)
Each individual has already made the decision to self administer based on their personal risk-benefit analysis, without the need for cell-based studies.
Publishing additional cell-based studies could increase the chance of drawing unwanted regulatory attention to their effort.
Thus, they don’t have strong incentives to carry out any cell-based studies (which would also take time and effort away from higher priority things they might work on instead), and they likely do have incentives to avoid publishing any cell-based studies.
Which leaves us in the current equilibrium where there are no published cell-based studies.
I think your claim that “they don’t care enough to bother” is not very accurate, and a consideration of their incentives as I outlined above provides an alternative reason why we might not expect to find any published cell-based studies.
At the end of the day, we all still have to make personal decisions based on the information at our disposal, as incomplete or challenging to interpret as it may be.
Happy to hear any additional thoughts on this topic!