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+--- Thread: Confessions of a 'human guinea pig': Why I'm resigning from Moderna vaccine trials (/thread-11536.html)
Confessions of a 'human guinea pig': Why I'm resigning from Moderna vaccine trials - C C - Jan 6, 2022
https://www.statnews.com/2022/01/04/confessions-vaccine-guinea-pig-im-resigning-from-moderna-vaccine-trials/
EXCERPTS (Jeremy Menchik): In July 2020, I volunteered to be in Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine trial. [...] Letting a company that had never brought a vaccine to market use my body as a test subject was scary, painful, and exhausting...
[...] I volunteered for the trial because I believed that helping Moderna develop a vaccine to help get the world out of the pandemic was worth it. Though the risks in agreeing to allow an experimental vaccine to be put into my body were obvious, the potential benefits seemed much more alluring...
[...] When the trial ended and I learned of the vaccine’s success, I was ecstatic that I had played a small role in furthering science that could help save lives. ... That initial feeling has receded in recent months as I have come to understand that the noble enterprise of science-making I had imagined I was a part of is actually, first and foremost, an exercise in ruthless corporate profit-making.
Instead of going all out to end the pandemic as quickly as possible, Moderna is helping prolong it by not making its mRNA technology available to the U.S. government or other manufacturers so global production can be scaled up quickly — and thereby maximizing its profits.
Moderna’s own projections suggest the company will make between $15 billion and $18 billion in sales in 2021 alone. And with the potential to apply the mRNA approach to vaccines for other diseases beyond this coronavirus [...] By some estimates, these vaccine makers are already making $65,000 every minute.
The irony is that this science should not have been a selfish exercise: The U.S. government provided roughly $2.5 billion to Moderna for development and purchase of vaccines. That investment should have ensured that humanity’s future is not decided by companies that have already made billions.
Without decisive action to make mRNA technology more widely available, the world will increasingly face [...] ominous new variants in the months and years ahead. This status quo is in no one’s best interest, except of course the companies that will profit when new variants arise, threatening repeated waves of death and infection...
While the process of science and the products it yields are noble, science for outrageous profit that costs people their lives is not noble. That is why I can no longer in good conscience be part of Moderna’s trials [...] We allowed Moderna to test its experimental vaccine and booster on us in order to help end this pandemic, not to make more pharma billionaires... (MORE - missing details)