Motivations to Volunteer

Abstract

If research sponsors must avoid undue inducement in order to avoid the problem of invalidating “free consent,” then another question begins to surface: why would anyone choose to volunteer as a subject in these vaccine studies? The risks involved would seem to provide good reasons for some potential volunteers to decline participation. In addition, general feelings of distrust toward government agencies (who would probably be co-sponsoring such studies) is hardly a peculiarity of Western societies. In the US, the history of ethically questionable medical experimentation, such as the Tuskegee study of untreated syphilis in black men, as well as numerous instances of government insensitivity toward persons of color, has made it exceptionally difficult for vaccine researchers to recruit black volunteers.¹ Researchers in some AIDS Vaccine Evaluation Units around the US, for example, have had a difficult time convincing members of the black community that this time, in this research, for this sexually transmitted disease, the government is going to treat them fairly and ethically. A study of 1160 gay men in Denver, San Francisco and Chicago found that 86 per cent of them had serious misgivings about how much the government could be trusted, or had “a real fear about the government.”²