In tough times should we be the Guinea Pigs?

As the Covid-19 virus continues to dominate planet earth, lots of groups have been working on and administrating their own special cure to it. They usually believe that it will be too late sitting back hands in hands and waiting for the government to spoon feed you some vaccine which you are not even 100% sure of. Now since they take matters in their own hands the test subjects they are left with are, perhaps, themselves. Even when ethical survey isn't required, citizen researchers must take seriously their increased moral obligations when promoting their self- interventions, particularly those with possibly serious public health and societal impacts, such as COVID-19 vaccines.

Barry Marshall, A name very famous and respected in the field of science and medicine, self-experimented and came up with one of the most important discoveries of the century. He disapproved of what the people formerly believed about stomach ulcers. Going against the people of his time, he self-injected in himself a bacteria just to prove his point that that bacteria is responsible for stomach ulcers in humans. It took him a lot of pain, time, risks and complains but eventually his point made sense to the masses. He got awarded the Nobel Prize in 2005.

Vaccine Development & Self-Experimentation cases as discussed in the 2011 film named Contagion.

The film talks about a virus outbreak or precisely an epidemic and how it causes a havoc in the world. It strikes a sharp resemblance with what happened to us almost 3 years back from today.  

The film undoubtedly has a few similarities to the current coronavirus outbreak. Like the novel coronavirus, which causes the infection presently called COVID-19, the film's virus jumped from creatures to individuals. The imaginary Virus infection slaughters over 20% of those infected, a size past the estimated 2% or so passing the death rate in the current episode. However along with the accuracies one scientific aspect of the film that strains reality, the experts say, is how quickly a vaccine against the new virus is developed. One issue that concerns me is that by day 130 they have a fully distributable vaccine. In reality that would be far from truth. Also the scientist testing vaccine candidates in primates in the film inoculates herself to prove the vaccine works — and says that physician Barry Marshall also inoculated himself. The same action for vaccine development would not be effective or safe as it needs to cater masses of people and not just an individual. Today, self-experimentation is gathering some kind of respect in the so-called bio-hacking community. The bio-hacking community is term given to a group of people who perform “do it yourself” biology. But is self-experimentation to develop and test vaccinations ethical at all?

Self-experimentation in science can be backed by liberal arguments concerning the value of person freedom. John Stuart Mill’s ‘Harm Principle’ states that “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others”. In cases where it only poses danger to the person experimenting themselves, at that point by the lights of the harm principle, it would not be reasonable to disallow such experimentation. This liberal contention in support of self-experimentation depends on the premise that self-experimentation does not posture a hazard of harm to others. However, in the case of vaccine self-experimentation in a global pandemic, it isn't clear that this condition is met.

Alan Krumwiede, a character from the film contagion, served as a freelance writer who was also a conspiracy theorist. This film showed how anyone can disguise as a messiah and sell whatever they want to. He managed to convince masses that forsythia is the real cure to the virus.  He goes on national television to accuse the CDC director and the entire government body for conspiring with Big Pharma to suppress the simple homeopathic cure, forsythia, in order to profit off the vaccine. Ironically he is someone who stands to profit off forsythia himself. In a video posted to his website, Alan fakes the symptoms of the virus and then “heals” himself with forsythia. Later, we see him roaming the streets in full protective gear, even though he’s supposedly immune, confirming to the fact that it was all a scam.

Now who’s to say who’s right or wrong? In such cases it’s their words against ours. Maybe what Alan says has a lot of truth to it, but in my opinion the route he took to put forth his own idea was at fault too. So the idea of self-experimentation still lies in the grey area in my opinion. Not everyone is as loyal to the game as Barry Marshall was. Such films act as an eye-opener as to what possibly goes behind the curtains or behind the façade of media manipulation. 

Moid Khan

November, 2021