Reference no: EM132848956

They will include about 1100 healthy volunteers between the ages of 18-55 in their first trial of this vaccine with human participants in the United Kingdom. The researchers will randomly assign half of the volunteers to receive the new COVID-19 vaccine and half of the volunteers to receive a placebo vaccine. They decided to use an existing vaccine for meningitis as a placebo instead of injecting people in that group with saline solution because the saline would not have side effects (like sore arm, headache and fever) so people might guess that they did not receive the new COVID-19 vaccine. The researchers noted that if the participants guessed that they did not receive the COVID-19 vaccine, that could affect their health behavior during the study and bias the results. All participants will keep an electronic diary for the first seven days after they get the shot and they also will report if they start feeling unwell in the three weeks following the shot. The researchers will keep in contact with the participants for six months after getting the shot to see how many people develop COVID-19 that got the new vaccine vs. the placebo vaccine. In order for the statistics to work on the results, the researchers have to hope that some people in their study will be infected with COVID-19 so that they can compare whether the vaccine group had a lower rate of infection than the placebo group. These researchers do not plan to use a "challenge study" or "controlled infection" design, so they will not intentionally infect their participants with COVID-19. The World Health Organization released ethical guidelines for the use of human challenge studies with COVID-19, since intentionally infecting human volunteers with the virus is risky even if it would be beneficial to study vaccine effectiveness.

Your discussion prompt:

-Please introduce yourself and tell us a question that you have researched an answer to because you thought it was interesting.

-For the scenario above, identify the independent variable and the dependent variable.

-What are some other variable that you can think of that might affect the results of this experiment?

-Explain why this is an experiment and not a correlational study.

-Identify whether this is a within-subjects or between-subjects experiment and explain why.

-What is the sample for this study and what is the population?

-If the variables in this study are: shot received (COVID-19 vaccine or placebo vaccine) and infection status within six months (infected, not infected), identify whether each of these variables is nominal, ordinal, interval or ratio and explain why.

-What type of sampling was used in this study, and how might the sampling affect the results obtained in the study?

-What do you think about using a "challenge study" to test the effectiveness of a new COVID-19 vaccine? If we are relying on natural transmission to see if the vaccine group gets infected less than the placebo group then it's possible that there will be too few infections in either group to be able to draw a conclusion. On the other hand, if you intentionally infect everyone with the virus (with their informed consent), then you will almost certainly have enough cases to be able to tell whether the vaccine worked or not. How do you view the risks and benefits of challenge studies with COVID-19? You can read the WHO paper linked above for ideas.