Bill Gates continues funding ‘flying vaccinators’ despite consent concerns
A project funded by billionaire Bill Gates to use mosquitos to vaccinate people is advancing despite concerns about informed consent.
Gates has been pursuing the concept of flying vaccinators since 2008, when researchers at Jichi Medical University in Japan used a Gates Foundation grant to study how to genetically modify mosquitos to inject malaria proteins into host bodies.
More recently, researchers at Leiden University Medical Center, who received $2.2 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, published a study showing how they used genetically modified mosquitos to vaccinate humans against malaria.
The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, split 20 participants into three groups. One group of nine was bitten by mosquitos carrying GA1, a malaria parasite that stops developing 24 hours after the host is infected. The second group of eight participants was bitten by mosquitos carrying GA2, a malaria parasite that stops developing six days after infection. The three participants in the third group received placebos in the form of mosquitos that did not carry malaria.
Each group received 150 bites across three separate sessions spaced 28 days apart. Three weeks after the third session, they were bitten five times by non-genetically modified malaria carrying mosquitoes. The researchers found that 89% of those in the GA2 group were protected against malaria, compared with 13% in the GA1 group and none in the placebo group.
Informed consent issues
Using mosquitoes as vaccinators has raised concerns about whether people would be permitted to give informed consent before being injected. The Blaze notes that Japanese researcher Shigeto Yoshida, who studied this vaccination method, said: "[M]edical safety issues and concerns about informed consent mitigate the use of the 'flying vaccinator' as a method to deliver vaccines."
Imperial College of London Professor Emeritus of Parasite Cell Biology Robert Sinden also said the issue of informed consent makes mosquito vaccinators an ethically problematic method that is unlikely to receive regulatory approval.
Nevertheless, ethical concerns about informed consent — a necessary component of medical freedom — have not stopped Gates from pursuing the flying vaccinator method.
"One of our biggest challenges isn't scientific; it's financial and political,” he said.
