Can’t help it, y’all. As I scramble to come up with the money to pay last years taxes, it hurts, actually hurts, to know that those who participate in clinical trials for a COVID-19 vaccine are being compensated.
Read this article from the NCBI and weep. Tell me, again, why it is that those of us who are both unfortunate enough to have contracted terminal cancer and also desperate enough to stay alive that we will do almost anything, are somehow a different story. Are we too not deserving of assistance and recognition “for the fair value of…time and effort expended in research participation?“
And how about this paragraph rationalizing compensation for vaccine ‘volunteers’: “Compensation also should be viewed as the ethical default because it helps to minimize the chance participants will be exploited by receiving benefits that are disproportionately low compared to the burdens they undertake and the value they contribute to research. While the prospect of direct benefit is relevant to avoiding exploitation, research benefits are not always present and are never certain. Thus, it often makes sense to compensate participants for their work via a wage-payment model, using a fair local wage for similarly burdensome nonresearch endeavors as a benchmark. This is not intended to make participants better off as compared to their financial baseline or even to fully compensate for participants’ opportunity costs but rather to acknowledge the value of their time and effort. Compensation can also help distinguish research activities, with their distinct goals and risks, from clinical care, signaling that participants are contributing to science and that individual benefit may not result from their research participation.“
Um, yeah. I can hope like hell that when I participate in a clinical trial I shall attain some personal benefit, but–particularly in phase I where safety versus efficacy is being assessed–it’s a crapshoot.
So why why why why why why why are cancer patients treated differently? This is a human rights issue. I am/we are more than our tissue. Those of us dealing with advanced cancer are desperately ill individuals who are taking on tremendous risk and burden in order to A. hopefully live longer and B. advance medical research—A being the far dicier of the two propositions.
And then there is this curious sentence: “We argue that reimbursement and compensation should be offered in COVID-19 trials as a matter of fairness, as is true for other types of clinical research.” I’m all for the fairness part but clearly they are talking about medical research with ‘healthy volunteers’, not those of us with cancer.
Thanks to COVID-19, clinical trials are having a big ass moment right now. Let’s not waste this opportunity to have some constructive dialogue per ongoing issues related to medical research such as disparity, accrual and compensation. And while we’re at it, let’s stop hiding the dirty little secret that exploiting cancer patients didn’t stop with Henrietta Lacks.
We can, and should, do better.
life and breath: outliving lung cancer 