Tabarrok on RADVAC, the DIY Vaccine

The RadVac vaccine, as you may recall, is the open-source, do-it-yourself vaccine. Here’s Technology Review from one year ago (July of 2020):

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 spritzed it up his nose.

…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 say…he believes the vaccine designed by Estep, his former graduate student at Harvard and one of his protégés, 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,” he says.

I’m a big fan of the RadVac vaccine and was recently asked to give a talk about the vaccine and the pluses and minuses of the open source approach. In my talk I cover patents, when it was rational to take an unapproved vaccine, the FDA, paternal medicine versus the Consumer Reports model and more. I’m especially pleased with this talk.

Addendum: Great set of posts from johnswentworth from LessWrong on making the vaccine and then testing it.

Comments

Comments for this post are closed