Case study: The Lübeck vaccine

NunoSempere

Case study: The Lübeck vaccine

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David T

I don't think that it's the possibility that Stöcker might have only allowed people of certain immigration status to take it or the possibility of differential impact on people that like or dislike his politics that huw was drawing attention to.^[1] Rather it's the point that medically qualified people with some interesting views have conducted some incredibly ugly experiments in the past, particularly in Germany, which is one of the reasons why you don't get to run unlicensed medical experiments on the general public just because you're a doctor.

From the limited coverage I've seen haven't seen any reason to believe that the decision to try to stop Stöcker to offer a vaccination claimed to be a COVID cure whilst its efficacy was essentially untested had anything to do with his politics (and if it did, I think the direction of causality is more individual becomes increasingly politically radical => individual being less willing to cooperate with bureaucrats than the other way round). I don't think there's been any serious suggestion that he actually intended to harm people, con people or exclude migrants from receiving the vaccine. But improperly prepared or ineffective vaccines delivered in good faith can potentially cause a lot of harm too.^[2]

It may be the case that German bureaucracy is particularly inflexible (it does have that reputation!) ^[3]but there is a happy medium between considering potential positive impact of shortening standard approval processes^[4] and not letting someone bypass regulations to inject people with a solution claimed to be a pandemic cure because they have relevant qualifications and claim to have validated it's safe and works on five people.

Yes, the COVID pandemic was an exceptional circumstance, but even or perhaps especially with COVID there are plenty of plausible circumstances where skipping the approval process results in more deaths than approval delays, including circumstances where the substance is harmless but ineffective but leads to behavioural change due to false beliefs about immunity.

Ultimately Stöcker is extremely well qualified, but so are a non-zero number of the quack cure promoters (for the record, I've also read a credible, critical source suggest his vaccine is plausibly effective, fairly unlikely to be harmful and not dissimilar to the approved Novavax COVID vaccine in approach so it's probably unfair to put him in the "quack" bracket. But I think it's fair to say that if his essentially untested approach to preventing COVID symptoms did actually work in the general population, it's the exception amongst untested "COVID cures"). And the RCTing a parachute analogy isn't appropriate here, because the "cure" plausibly leads to more deaths than the problem. So even the most streamlined drug approval process isn't going to look like letting doctors say or do what they want in a pandemic if they have a vaguely plausible method and let natural selection sort out whether they're right.

^{^}
afaik Stöcker made no attempt to qualify who did and didn't receive his vaccine and no matter how strongly he might feel about the topic of immigration, I'm sure he's aware that vaccinating immigrants benefits German citizens too...
^{^}
If you Google "Lubeck vaccine" you'll see fewer references to Stöcker and more to a grisly story from many years earlier about how a contaminated batch of the otherwise notably safe and effective BCG immunization killed over a quarter of babies injected with it.
^{^}
It also has one of the world's biggest pharmaceutical industries, so the problem isn't insurmountable...

^{^}

Something which itself wasn't uncontroversial, both amongst actual professionals and politically motivated promoters of vaccine hesitancy.

Case study: The Lübeck vaccine

Case study: The Lübeck vaccine

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