Virus World

Preston Estep was alone in a borrowed laboratory, somewhere in Boston. No big company, no board meetings, no billion-dollar payout from Operation Warp Speed, the US government’s covid-19 vaccine funding program. No animal data. No ethics approval. What he did have: ingredients for a vaccine. And one willing volunteer. Estep swirled together the mixture and and spritzed it up his nose. 

Nearly 200 covid-19 vaccines are in development and some three dozen are at various stages of human testing. But in what appears to be the first “citizen science” vaccine initiative, Estep and at least 20 other researchers, technologists, or science enthusiasts, many connected to Harvard University and MIT, have volunteered as lab rats for a do-it-yourself inoculation against the coronavirus. They say it’s their only chance to become immune without waiting a year or more for a vaccine to be formally approved. Among those who’ve taken the DIY vaccine is George Church, the celebrity geneticist at Harvard University, who took two doses a week apart earlier this month. The doses were dropped in his mailbox and he mixed the ingredients himself.

Church believes the vaccine designed by Estep, his former graduate student at Harvard and one of his proteges, is extremely safe. “I think we are at much bigger risk from covid considering how many ways you can get it, and how highly variable the consequences are,” says Church, who says he has not stepped outside of his house in five months. The US Centers for Disease Control recently reported that as many as one-third of patients who test positive for covid-19 but are never hospitalized battle symptoms for weeks or even months after contracting the virus. “I think that people are highly underestimating this disease,” Church says. Harmless as the experimental vaccine may be, though, whether it will protect anyone who takes it is another question. And the independent researchers who are making and sharing it might be stepping onto thin legal ice, if they aren’t there already....

See also: 

https://radvac.org/

Daegu, the city at the epicentre of South Korea‘s coronavirus outbreak, has filed a civil damages suit against a church that has been linked to over 5,200 of the country’s cases. Widespread infections among members of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus in February and March made South Korea the first country to have a major outbreak outside China. The city now is seeking 100bn won (£66m) in damages from the church for allegedly ignoring the city’s quarantine measures and allowing the disease to spread among its members. The church has insisted it fully complied with government efforts. At least 5,213 of the South Korea's total 12,484 Covid-19 cases have been linked to the church, according to the Korea Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

Authorities had previously filed a complaint against the church, accusing it of refusing to submit a full list of members and facilities and not cooperating with city health efforts. The church’s founder, Lee Man-hee, has advised members who recovered from the virus to donate their blood plasma for coronavirus research. Around 4,000 recovered Covid-19 patients from the religious group have reportedly agreed to donate their plasma as a way to express gratitude to the government and medical staff. South Korea health officials have said that, in the absence of other treatments or vaccines, plasma therapy may be a way to lower the death rate, especially in critical patients. At least 17 South Koreans have received the experimental therapy, which involves using plasma from recovered patients with antibodies to the virus, enabling the body to defend against the disease. South Korea has reported 281 deaths from Covid-19.