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The HIV vaccine trial (Merck V520-023 study) was conducted on people around the globe with the aim of preventing HIV condition. Additionally, Dieffenbach and Fauci (2020) claim that the STEM study also explored the prospect of lowering the amount of HIV infection in people who already suffer from the illness. The National Institutes of Health (2007) summarize that the origin of the vaccine already implies the impossibility of treating disorders due to its synthetic production. Therefore, the latter goal was not met during the study, which means that the trial still aimed to analyze whether vaccinated participants would contract the HIV infection.
Having briefly researched the origin and description of the Merck V520-023 study, it is safe to say that it goes against the ethical principles of healthcare. First of all, not only did the medics who conducted the trial likely put the lives of 3000 participants at risk, they definitely compromised their patients’ safety (Schofield et al., 2021). The lack of research and testing of the HIV vaccine was evident, and the outcomes of the trial could be either adverse or outstanding. The main problem here is that no one could predict how the vaccine would affect the participants, so this trial should not have occurred at all without prior testing and analysis. Moreover, it has not been mentioned whether the participants signed an informed consent about possible risks of getting vaccinated. Therefore, it could be another ethical issue in this STEM study.
The in-depth description of the STEM study clearly states that the risks of participants getting HIV because of the vaccines were zero. In fact, the National Institutes of Health (2007) state that since the medication is produced with synthetic material, it is not feasible for people to contract HIV after being vaccinated. Therefore, the primary benefit of this study is that people could get immune to the HIV infection, provided the vaccine worked. Yet it is safe to assume that the inefficacy or failure of the medication could lead to negative repercussions for participants’ health. For instance, the vaccine could provoke other diseases and simply contribute to complications with health. Overall, conducting a vaccine trial on 3000 people before testing the medication properly was not only risky but foolish, considering it could endanger the lives of many innocent individuals.
Naturally, the lack of reliable data to prove the efficacy of the vaccine, comparing results of medication injection and placebo, led to the STEM study being terminated. Even though the practice of including a placebo group in the survey is typical in medical experimentations, it is often called unethical (Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, 2022). As a matter of fact, it is expected to use the standard treatment (in this case, vaccine) as an active control in the study to avoid unnecessary risks to the placebo group. Besides, it is ethically concerning that the STEM study selected only men who have sex with men as participants for this experiment, excluding heterosexual candidates (National Institutes of Health, 2007). Therefore, it is unfair of the study coordinators to assume that most homosexual males can get the HIV infection and not the individuals who are heterosexual. Yet the exclusion of heterosexual participants may seem ethically problematic as well, considering that they did not have access to receiving the vaccine and did not have an opportunity to develop immunity to HIV.
References
Dieffenbach, C. W., & Fauci, A. S. (2020). The search for an HIV vaccine, the journey continues. Journal of the International AIDS Society, 23(5).
National Institutes of Health. (2007). Clinical alert: Immunizations are discontinued in two HIV vaccine trials. National Library of Medicine. Web.
Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. (2022). Human experimentation: An introduction to the ethical issues. Web.
Schofield, G., Dittborn, M., Selman, L. E., & Huxtable, R. (2021). Defining ethical challenge(s) in healthcare research: A rapid review. BMC Medical Ethics, 22(1).
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