The Los Angeles Times | October 29, 2020
“It’s a huge gamble, because you’re giving the vaccine to people who are healthy,” said Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University.
Such a risk might make sense in a country where the virus was rapidly spreading and front-line workers were constantly exposed to COVID-19 — as in the United States — but Western health experts and vaccine makers have been wary of prematurely rolling out a vaccine.
“I would not expect a country with a highly developed regulatory and safety system like the United States, the European Union [states] or Japan to allow that kind of wide access to an unproven vaccine,” Gostin said. “It’s unethical, and it’s dangerous.”