No Free Trials

At first, what everyone wanted to know about the highly anticipated COVID-19 vaccines were basic things: whether they were safe, whether they were effective, who could get them and when, how to get a coveted appointment. Once that was resolved, we wondered whether one shot offered better protection than another and for how long, whether everyone at the party had one, whether we needed a booster. In all cases, when the answers came, they seemed to materialize out of thin air. The science seemed to take place behind the closed doors of hospitals, in other people’s bodies. I couldn’t leave my house or open my phone without seeing a clip-art syringe on some billboard or banner ad, but the experimental trials generating the numbers were relatively invisible.

When the trials did show up in the news, I paid close attention. Specialty news outlets published lionizing interviews under headlines like “COVID-19 Vaccine Trial Participant Tells Healthline: ‘It’s the Right Thing to Do.’” The message these articles offered to readers (at least until the Delta variant came along) was clear: keep your chin up, because participants’ antibodies are the harbingers of the end of the pandemic. Test subjects were objects of curiosity. They were portrayed as our mediums, oracles of immunity. The interviewees told reporters about their own high hopes for vaccine development, and how glad they were to be a part of the process. They understood that they were doing something good. They’d made themselves useful.

I both am and am not one of these people. In January of this year, I signed up for a trial testing two doses of the “one and done” Johnson & Johnson vaccine. It was a decision made less out of altruism than self-interest: I was scared for myself and the people around me. I wanted a shot, and I wanted one now, and if I could get some money in return, even better. Taking part in a trial wasn’t new to me — my preschool permitted developmental psychologists to use its students as guinea pigs. With my parents’ consent, grad students put three-year-old me through multiple psychometric tests per week. In elementary school, I made my allowance through trial payouts from a major longitudinal study and its side gigs, despite being afraid of needles. I played Pokémon on the nurse’s Gameboy Color during my first blood draw, trading my fluids for a carton of grape drink, a popsicle, and $75, which, to my eight-year-old brain, was the most money anyone could possibly have. I cried when the nurse stuck the needle in my arm. “You’re doing a good thing!” she said.

The trial I am enrolled in is running in parallel to a one-dose trial. We are 30,000 test subjects; they are 45,000. Both have cute names: Their trial is called ENSEMBLE; ours is ENSEMBLE 2. Whoever named them is right