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redrightreturning t1_iykqkj3 wrote

I was in an HIV vaccine trial like 15 years ago back in NY. The results at the time had seemed promising enough for the FDA to extend their trials. When the study was unblinded it had turned out that i was in the highest-dose experimental group, meaning maybe I’m immune to HIV, but afaik i was never exposed to the virus so it’d be hard to know for sure. Anyway, I’m always excited for more research on this subject and I feel a connection to the experimenters and study participants working to put an end to this god-awful disease.

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Upstairs-Motor2722 t1_iyl39h3 wrote

Thank you for helping us all.

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redrightreturning t1_iyl6e6k wrote

You’re so welcome. I encourage everyone to go participate in clinical trials. It’s so cool to be a part of the process. And usually the researchers are so passionate and appreciative. Participating as a subject humanizes science and makes it more tangible for people who otherwise aren’t in touch with it.

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Bobert_Manderson t1_iyl7kgn wrote

Maybe when you’re old and know you ain’t got long you can just try a little bit of HIV to see if you were immune the whole time.

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HomoRoboticus t1_iyll98e wrote

I mean if I knew I had <3 years or something - fuck it, let's make a win out of it.

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omnichronos t1_iyme0mv wrote

You can also earn a living doing it. I did one last month that paid $15,050. I just received my final payment yesterday. It allows me to be a better Santa Clause to my poor family.

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redrightreturning t1_iymeare wrote

Hell yeah. I have been in other paid studies too. Most recently one for Botox lol. Got free Botox and got paid for them to study my face. Lol. Make that money and enjoy the holidays.

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mcspazz731 t1_iymx6qx wrote

Where do you find them, I have some interest but never really looked into it much.

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crown_valley t1_iymztdi wrote

Where do you find "opportunities" like this?? Is there like a website I'm not aware of or something?

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omnichronos t1_iynn15s wrote

If you have an expensive medical condition, you might consider the free health care of a study that includes travel pay. See ClinicalTrials.gov for those.

Or, if you're healthy, you can be a healthy human subject for medical research studies, like me. I spent the month of October at a medical clinic so they can test a minute amount of a new drug on me intended to help hypoparathyroidism. In exchange, I collected $15,050. If you're interested, it's worth traveling to other states to do them. Many are paying over $10k currently. You can see them on the website StudyScavenger.com or JALR.Org, which stands for Just Another Lab Rat.

Canada has some also:
Toronto: [BioPharmaServices.com] (https://www.BioPharmaServices.com), PharmaMedica.com,
ToNovum.com, AtCliantha.com
Montreal: ParticipantsMtl.AltaSciences.com

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Fluenzia t1_iyn7zti wrote

Man where do you find trials that pay that well. I have looked on the websites that people recommend and there's either none near me or they want such a specific demographic I don't fall into it.

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omnichronos t1_iynmp65 wrote

> there's either none near me

It's unlikely that they will be near you. I traveled from Detroit to Madison WI for my last one and my next one is in Nebraska. It's worth driving all day a couple of times for several thousand dollars.

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Fluenzia t1_iynnuqw wrote

Yeah I'm currently in university and in Canada so I don't know the difference that will make but driving far kinda sucks with school.

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omnichronos t1_iynw3i4 wrote

My Canadian friend is trying to do the US ones because they pay better here.

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Fluenzia t1_iyo5hzv wrote

Yeah if you're in Detroit I'm across the river so I suppose it's the same distance

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begaterpillar t1_iyle3bk wrote

you can even make money doing them

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No_Mammoth_4945 t1_iym97k1 wrote

Yep. I took part in the Pfizer Covid trial that just ended a couple months ago. I got paid 5$ a week to answer a yes or no question on my phone and around 200$ for each in person visit. It was double blinded but once it got approved they told you if you got the vaccine or the placebo and I ended up getting the vaccine months before anyone I knew. Win win

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begaterpillar t1_iymdlcr wrote

I did like 10 15 paid studies when I was a student . I got paid anywhere between 250$ to 3500$. average around 700. most of them I stayed in the clinic from Friday night to Sunday evening. took a dose of a different drug and they took blood samples. it was great I just brought my homework. the 3500 one I was in the clinic for 2 weeks though. that one was a little rough but still better than working a random construction job for months to save up that much money. they had decent wifi and the food was okay

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diskowmoskow t1_iylrdja wrote

How these studies conducted for effectiveness for acquiring the virus? Trial subjects are already in high risk groups (sex workers / HIV+ partners)? I would like to be part of these studies but in anycase I wouldn’t do any unprotected sex (apart from accidents during protected sex).

I am really happy for advancements in HIV studies. PrEP already changing lifes of many but battle of supplying of these preventions (as well as medicines) seem still trivial for big part of the world.

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redrightreturning t1_iymengu wrote

They weren’t studying efficacy in that way in my case. I’m guessing it would be really hard to study high-risk people over a long time. And really expensive to follow people for 20, 30, 40’years.

In the study I was in they drew blood to test for the presence of antibodies to HIV.

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TheGoodFight2015 t1_iyl9ouj wrote

If you were in the highest dose experimental group, why would you make the conclusion that you are immune to HIV? Are you saying you believe you were likely exposed to HIV virus but that medication ended up not working in the study?

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redrightreturning t1_iylaaw8 wrote

No, no one was exposed to HIV, that would obviously be unethical. The way the drug worked was that it was supposed to mimic some of the HIV proteins and cause your body to make antibodies to those. The study was also experimenting with a novel mechanism of injecting the vaccine, using an electrical sock (for lack of a better word) to facilitate the uptake of the vaccine.

*shock, not sock

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Louisville_Jason t1_iyli7cj wrote

I'm sorry...using a what?

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bootymix96 t1_iyllkh9 wrote

Pretty sure they meant electric shock, which is a phenomenon known as electroporation (Sardesai & Weiner 2011). According to Sardesai and Weiner (2011), electroporation involves a series of “brief electric pulses” administered in conjunction with DNA-based injected vaccines to boost the vaccine’s uptake by our cells through “transient and reversible permeabilization of the cell membrane.”

Ojiambo (2021) discusses the administration process in the context of COVID-19 vaccinations. The DNA-based vaccine is injected, a separate hand-held device is used to generate the electrical impulses at the injection site immediately afterwards, and those impulses induce electroporation and allow the vaccine molecules to break through our cell membranes and increase our immune system response to the vaccine (Ojiambo 2021).

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techno156 t1_iylqg4w wrote

Interesting that electroporation works on people. I only expected it to work on bacteria, or to be unsafe for humans due to the whole heart and brain thing.

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Just_Another_Wookie t1_iym025p wrote

As long as the path of the current doesn't cross the brain or heart, it's all good!

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dromaeovet t1_iym1uqt wrote

Electroporation is one of the principles by which Dolly the sheep was cloned :) They basically took cell contents that could eventually become the sheep, used electroporation to insert it into a recipient cell, and then implanted that in the surrogate.

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redrightreturning t1_iymfsy4 wrote

Yes this is exactly what I meant! Thank you for adding your knowledge.

I will say the shocks hurt pretty bad. The first time they told me it would be like getting punched in the arm. Well it turns out I had never been punched before so I had no idea what to expect and almost passed out. Subsequent times I was ready for it and it wasn’t as bad.

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MicrosoftOSX t1_iylkd89 wrote

e-sock. like e-mail, but a sock

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JebediahKerman3999 t1_iylo026 wrote

If you put a sock over the vaccine, when the virus grabs it it only has the sock

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MicrosoftOSX t1_iylovh3 wrote

It is especially effective around the end of the year

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teraflux t1_iylm1jq wrote

I use SOCKS 5, great for pirating things

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redrightreturning t1_iymfyqo wrote

Woops, I meant an electrical shock. A user below did a good job explaining what the process is and why they used it.

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TheGoodFight2015 t1_iyvqox9 wrote

Sorry I didn’t mean exposed in the study, I meant exposed at some other period in your life. But then I see you said they believe they weren’t exposed, so my post was pretty confusing. So you’re basically wondering how well the drug worked for you personally. I’m just still confused because wouldn’t they provide data for the efficacy in the experimental group of that trial? Or are you saying it’s still ongoing?

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Pjcrafty t1_iylaili wrote

He means that he got the highest dose of vaccine, so since it looked promising in general he may be immune since he got a big vaccine dosage.

The experimental group in a vaccine study isn’t exposed to what they’re vaccinating for. That would be extremely unethical.

They compare the vaccinated population to the unvaccinated control group in the population and see if the people who got vaccinated contract the virus at a lower rate.

So, for example, you vaccinate 10k people and have a control group of 10k people who get a placebo. Over the next 5 years, 100 people in the control group get HIV but only 2 people in the vaccine group do. That implies that the vaccine works, because ideally your control and test groups are similar enough that the only thing that makes them different is having the vaccine.

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Baud_Olofsson t1_iylwdh0 wrote

And as a sidenote, this is why vaccine trials usually take so long: it takes ages for enough people to get infected to be able to draw any real conclusions about the vaccine's efficacy.

With COVID, which was spreading like wildfire, you didn't need to wait long at all - you got statistically significant results within months.

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redrightreturning t1_iyleugw wrote

I’m not a “he”. Pro tip: If you don’t know someone’s gender it’s completely bizarre to assume. It’s literally no skin off your nose to write “they” instead of assuming someone’s gender. Do better.

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Pjcrafty t1_iylfwlh wrote

I was using he in the “gender neutral” sense, but you’re right that that’s fallen out of favor.

While I do apologize for misgendering you, I think that you could have made your point a bit more politely. That wouldn’t have been any skin off of your nose either.

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NotShey t1_iylikz1 wrote

That's an incredibly aggressive and rude way to address someone making an innocent mistake.

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[deleted] t1_iylgsht wrote

[deleted]

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redrightreturning t1_iylhka9 wrote

Thanks for engaging. I’m glad you don’t care, and still therefore took the time to write about how much i shouldn’t care. Since you took the time to write, I thought I’d give you the same courtesy.

I think what annoys me is when people assume you are male, it’s like male is the “normal” default. But actually, being female is default for me, and like half of the world. Just like it would be weird for someone to assume I’m Chinese (I’m not) or Indian (I’m not) just because there are a lot of Chinese and Indian people in the world, it’s weird to assume I’m a man. There’s no benefit to assuming my ethnicity, and there is likewise no benefit to assuming my gender. Furthermore, it takes no more effort for someone to write “they” instead of “he”. The only difference is that it means they weren’t assuming things about my identity.

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FormalWrangler294 t1_iylhppz wrote

Don’t assume someone on the internet is a native English speaker. That’s racist, do better.

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Whiterabbit-- t1_iylf9xo wrote

fwiw depending on how you learned English, "he" could very well be the non-gendered singular pronoun. "he" is the male or generic pronoun. "she" is the feminine pronoun. what I'm saying is that person may not be trying to insult you. but regardless, I want to thank you for your participation in the vaccine.

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nicktheone t1_iylm68j wrote

Moreover, in many languages masculine pronouns are the neutral/undefined gender by rule so it's also possible they are not an English native speaker and used their own grammar rules.

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HomoRoboticus t1_iyllu3o wrote

> it’s completely bizarre to assume

I assume this all the time on Reddit. It's not bizarre at all.

It's not right, sure. But it's not bizarre.

> It’s literally no skin off your nose to write “they”

"They" is traditionally a plural pronoun, so, either we knowingly make a grammatical mistake and introduce possible confusion there or we just take a 50/50. My English prof, a very snooty old white dude with a lot at stake in such trivial grammatical affairs, suggested using "he" half the time and "she" the other half - on different essays/posts of course so as not to be too confusing.

Whatever side you come down on this - and there is no objective right or wrong here - the one thing we can all agree on is that it's trivial and only pedantic cretins like me (and apparently you) worry about it.

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MadNoobins t1_iym1dkv wrote

serious question, did you know you were testing the HIV vaccine? what did it pay and what did they tell you the risks were when you signed up?

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redrightreturning t1_iyme288 wrote

Yes I knew. I was paid $50 or $100 per visit I believe (this was 15 years ago). Iirc I received a basic check up first and then over time 2 or 3 doses of vaccine. most visits were a quick blood draw. The study lasted over a year and I think I probably went in about 1-2x/per month.

They did explain the risks. That is a normal part of the consent process for any human subject participating in a study.

To be clear, there was NO RISK of being exposed to HIV, if that is your concern. The vaccine didn’t contain any HIV.

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ClassyDingus t1_iymk8ch wrote

Thank you for being a part of the trials!

Anyone who wants a little more story telling about the history of AidsVax and how shit we treated HIV/AIDS patients in the past, highly recommend Not Past Its episode on the subject. https://gimletmedia.com/shows/not-past-it/o2hm7z6

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IceEngine21 t1_iylo6mk wrote

Do you know why the research wasnt continued using the highest dosing?

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redrightreturning t1_iymfc00 wrote

Not sure what you mean. They had several arms of the experiment. I think a control, a low dose, and a maybe one or two higher dose. After a few months the results seemed to indicate that some people in the experiment were producing antibodies. The fda told them they could expand the study to do an additional round of vaccines - like a booster. When the study was unblinded I found out I was in the highest dose arm of the study and had also received the booster.

Running experiments is hard and costly- especially ones that unfold over a long time son they can’t go on indefinitely.

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GimmickNG t1_iynayi1 wrote

Probably because higher doses would be more costly and inefficient if lower doses were equally effective.

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SummerCaps t1_iymfgn6 wrote

Did you receive compensation?

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redrightreturning t1_iymhxg4 wrote

Yes… it was i think $50 or $100 per session, and i went in about 1x/month over a year. Also, when i moved across the country, they paid for my flights to come back to NY, which was very generous.

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Mandelvolt t1_iyoe5as wrote

Props for donating your body to science while you're still living in it!

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