Marisa Taylor’s series of stories exposed a rogue, unethical and illegal vaccine experiment overseen by a tenured American professor with the complicity of his university, Southern Illinois University, and his company. The series found that Americans received shots, containing the untested vaccine, in a house on a Caribbean Island and in U.S. hotel rooms, with no official oversight by the FDA or conventional monitoring by an Institutional Review Board. Although the professor, William Halford, had injected Americans with a live virus without the required oversight, he received support from his university and funding from billionaire and President Trump supporter Peter Thiel. Taylor revealed the university – which consistently said it had no role in what was private research by a professor – shared in the patents on the prospective vaccine. Taylor found the professor had been using his university email and phone and other resources at his lab for setting up his experiments. Even before he headed offshore, he had been injecting U.S. citizens with the live virus in hotels near the university campus although the experiments lacked medical oversight and he was not a doctor. Taylor also found Halford had not sought approval from an institutional review board, which Southern Illinois University, a public university, had pledged to the federal government it would require in all research. Taylor tracked down some of the participants in the experiments and discovered they did not know his practices were unauthorized. She also found that they had tried to tell Halford about possible side effects they experienced but he ignored them and did not report the potential problems as required. The company, meanwhile, continued to play up the vaccine research as a success as it tried to solicit funding from private investors like Thiel. Lastly, Taylor found this case revealed gaps in the regulatory system set up to protect human subjects in experiments.
