Computer Simulations to Enhance Vaccine Trials




Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society: Audio Fishbowl show

Summary: Infectious disease emergencies are opportunities to test the efficacy of newly developed interventions — for example, drugs, vaccines, and treatment regimens. Yet they raise many intertwined challenges around politics, logistics, ethics, and study design. In this talk — part of our Digital Health @ Harvard series — Professor Marc Lipsitch describes his work on computer simulation of vaccine trials during epidemics to assess options for trial design, as well as some of his recent work on the ethics of trials in emergencies, and stimulates discussion on the intersection of these two topics to help disentangle ethical from political and logistical concerns, as well as to reduce the time pressure to make a decision and encourage rational deliberation by future stakeholders. Find out more info on this event here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018-11-27/computer-simulations-enhance-vaccine-trials