(2023-01-18) Russo What Should We Do With The New Fentanyl Vaccine

Nick Russo: What Should We Do With The New Fentanyl Vaccine?

For over a decade, epidemic fentanyl addiction has been a mass casualty crisis, and a significant—if not primary—contributor to the rot of every major city in the country

Scientists have developed a fentanyl vaccination. Next uncomfortable question: should addicts be asked, pressured, or even forced to take it?

Nick Russo guests for Pirate Wires with a piece on the new vaccine

By May 2021, for the first time in history, over 100,000 Americans had died of opioid overdoses in the preceding twelve months, which is more than gun violence deaths and traffic fatalities combined. This surge has been fueled primarily by fentanyl.

simultaneously asserted “existing treatment regimens and public health programs are not sufficient to stem the rising tide of fatalities.”

Haile’s group has developed a vaccine that prevents rats from feeling the euphoric effects of fentanyl without inducing any notable adverse side effects. It also prevents rats from overdosing, and both benefits are expected to translate to human recipients. In the coming months, they will begin manufacturing clinical-grade vaccines for use in human trials.

boosters are required to maintain preventative effects

Experts tout the vaccine as a means of relapse prevention; if recovering addicts cannot get high as they try to get back on the wagon, the rate of relapse (which is presently astronomical) should drop

two questions. First, should drug vaccines be used merely to treat addiction, or also to prevent it? And second, should vaccination be purely voluntary, or are there circumstances under which it should be mandatory? A 2014 Nature article delved deeply into both questions, which often bleed into one another.

Granting that universal childhood drug vaccine mandates might not be well-received by the public, they turned their attention to specific subpopulations for which mandates would be more politically palatable. For example, we could impose vaccine requirements on “those eligible for parole or those who accept welfare.”

Even these more targeted mandates would likely face stiff resistance in the arena of national politics. But, having just lived through the COVID pandemic, we’re all too aware that unprecedented times are often used by policy makers to justify unprecedented measures

But it’s precisely because this seizure of power is so tantalizing that we need to be careful here.

Consider first its use to target at-risk groups. If a fentanyl vaccine were required to access welfare and housing, it’s not hard to imagine that those deepest in the throes of addiction would refuse it and thereby lose out on desperately needed material aid.

The program is so successful we start to wonder what other public health mandates we tack onto it to save American lives.