Might have to take their show on the road, to find a suitable challenge population. Or they could use possibly use health-care workers who are at higher risk of exposure.

617 US deaths today, the lowest number since Mar 29. And those deaths reflect infections acquired at least a week ago. New cases diagnosed continue to decline, despite massively increased testing.

Whether a vaccine is ever developed or not, this epidemic will burn itself out, just as every other epidemic has in recorded history.

Whether we have even mitigated the damage with all of the lockdowns will forever remain a mystery, because it is an ‘n of one’ experiment, poorly susceptible to statistic analysis.

Clearly ‘mistakes were made’ in premature and inappropriate use of ventilators and seeding nursing homes full of the most vulnerable with hospital patients who were still contagious. Perhaps the lawyers who are about to get rich will lead the economic recovery...

There is a whole website made up 14000 volunteers for a challenge trail. If the want to go that route they are not gonna have a problem finding volunteers. Clearing the ethics board may by a slightly bigger hurdle. The website is like 1 day sooner.

I think they should just give the trial to people in nursing homes whether they volunteer or not. They gave them the actual virus in the same way.

For clarity...

By "challenge population", I meant a population which would be naturally challenged by the virus in the wild. If the bug dries up in some countries, might have to go elsewhere (Africa is a possibility).

The issue isn't just getting enough exposure in the trial, it's doing it fast enough to get a vaccine approved quickly. They could run a 10-year trial and probably get enough data from that... eventually.



An intentional challenge trial would also be reasonable IMO, the risks are pretty well-known for age and health condition. I'd volunteer. They can do safety trials with the usual age groups (start in the middle, young and healthy, then move out to very young and old) but restrict an intentional challenge trial to the young-ish.

Of course there would be hand-wringers

I got you. Yeah I think I would be in too. The WHO is now backing it as conditionally as well. We ask people to work in fire fighting, law enforcement, and serve in the military and all of those have a much higher then zero percent chance of ending you disabled or dead. This could save countless lives.

Owww
Twist that knife...

Well stated! And we can't even vaccinate a flu successfully. What makes this so different?

A much slower mutation rate.

There are some of hosts of panel discussion and interview shows that lean left. However, for actual news REPORTING, NPR (along with PBS is the most objective broadcast news source “on air”. Of course, when you’re so far to the extreme right, anything centrist is “leftist”