In October 2014, there was an Ebola breakout in West Africa. At the time, there was no vaccine for the virus, however, there were some experimental drugs that had not yet been approved for humans. Because the spread of the disease was reaching an epidemic, there were calls to initiate randomized trials of an experimental drug on human subjects right away.
(a) Discuss how you would go about designing a randomized trial to assess the efficacy of an experimental Ebola vaccine.
(b) Doctors Without Borders was on the record, prior to any randomized trial, as saying that trials in which subjects are assigned to a control group are unethical. Discuss the ethics behind a randomized trial of a potential life-saving vaccine to test its efficacy while an epidemic is raging?