Ethics

The search for an AIDS vaccine has preoccupied scientific study from the time the disease was first discovered. A cure will free millions of people from the strict medical regime they have to follow and ensure a better life for those infected with the disease. It will also mean vast profits for the firm that develops the vaccine. However, in the search for a panacea to the problem of AIDS, humanity must lose itself in acts of expediency at the expense of vulnerable members of society (Mellahi  Wood, 2002). Taking advantage of poor citizens in developing nations to carry out clinical trials is akin to handing them a death certificate.  Without evidence concerning potential side effects, any trials on uninformed human is unethical. The benchmark for establishing whether their action is ethical or not, is to ask whether such trials would have been conducted in the home country without risk of litigation.

If the answer to this question is yes, then the pharmaceutical firm is wrong to conduct trial on the rural folk. Even if the answer is no, the issue of how exposure to the disease arises. The community has a low risk factor with regards to AIDS. For any trials to be considered successful, they should be conducted in high risk areas where the efficacy of the vaccine would be easily established.

To argue that the mortality and morbidity rates from treatable and preventable diseases in the rural area may be as high as or higher than the national AIDS figure per population density, does not justify such trials. The possibility that hundreds of people could contract a terminal disease because of the trials is very real. In addition to the risk of catching AIDS, the rural folk may be infected with opportunistic disease as a side effect. The tradeoff between dying from common diseases and catching AIDS or AIDS related infections is too high. In normal circumstances, children are not orphaned by malaria related deaths of both parents. Instead, the children succumb to malaria, typhoid and other common diseases.

Providing medical treatment for the rural folk would be step forward in improving their heath standards. However, the opportunity cost is too high to justify using the community as guineas pigs.  Consequentialists would argue that the death of a few hundred people is the price society has to pay for discovering a cure to the deadly disease. If by conducting trials on the rural folk a cure can be found that will save millions of lives, the positive results will outweigh the negative consequences. While this argument is very persuasive, the question begs why the pharmaceutical firm had to go to a rural community in a developing nation (Mellahi  Wood, 2002). One consideration is that they were hoping to take advantage of illiterate people with no access to legal advice. This would ensure that the community did not press for damages in the event that something went wrong during the trials.

In conclusion, the decision to conduct trials in a remote village was not done in good faith. The firm hoped to maximize profits by validating its experiments with the vaccine at the lowest possible cost. In the process, they preferred to take advantage of vulnerable villagers with no idea as to their rights and obligations under such trials. Considering the company stood to reap huge profits from the sale of an effective vaccine, there should have been elaborate measures put into place to compensate the community for their participation in the trials. Secondly, the community should have received full disclosure of the potential risks they faced by agreeing to sign up for the program. This way there would general agreement that the trials were not a cheap attempt to experiment with the vaccine.