We’re delighted to welcome Professor Nir Eval, the Henry Rutgers Professor of Bioethics at the Rutgers School of Public Health, who will explore the ethical case for proceeding with human challenge trials for some highly lethal and highly infectious pathogens.
The seminar will take place from 12:30 to 13:30 in the BDI building, seminar rooms, followed by lunch and networking from 13:30 to 14:30.
Please register to attend by completing the form below by Wednesday 4 March.
Abstract
Human challenge trials (HCTs) for pathogens for which no therapy exists as yet may seem uniformly more acceptable when unlikely to kill participants (say, thanks to participant selection and a steep age gradient) than when they are likely to kill them. In a key set of circumstances, however, that assumption turns out to be false. Imagine an outbreak of an engineered virus confirmed to be both highly lethal and highly infectious. Our calculations show that on plausible assumptions, an HCT to assess the efficacy of (a) vaccine candidate(s), alternative or complementary to field trials, would save more lives than it takes among the trial participants and boost the prospects of each to survive the pandemic, and their life expectancy. This result holds across a wide range of severity per infection. The main reason for this perplexing result is that a pathogen that is highly infectious is likely to reach most everyone before long from natural spread of the pathogen. Being randomized to early access to an experimental vaccine candidate with average chance of success and being guaranteed medical care and early vaccine access makes a bigger difference to one’s survival chances and life expectancy than whether or not one is exposed to the virus by researchers. This is an instance of a more general lesson: when a pathogen is highly infectious (whether highly lethal or not), human challenge participation can be protective.
Biography
Professor Nir Eyal is the inaugural Henry Rutgers Professor of Bioethics as well as the inaugural Dr. and Mrs. Stanley S. Bergen Professor of Bioethics in the Department of Health Behavior, Society, and Policy at the Rutgers School of Public Health. He is also a faculty member in the Rutgers Department of Philosophy, and a member of Rutgers’s Institute for Health. Professor Eyal engages a broad range of bioethical issues, especially in population-level bioethics, including health care rationing in resource-poor settings, priority-setting on the path to universal health coverage, disaster triage, allocating human resources for health, ethical issues in health promotion, and ethical issues in research on human participants.
