Tech billionaire and informal Donald Trump adviser Peter Thiel bankrolled a herpes vaccine trial in the Caribbean that not only flouted United States safety laws, but also potentially put human clinical trial participants at risk. Thiel invested $7 million in the biotech company Rational Vaccines, which ran experimental herpes vaccine testing from April to August 2016. (Neither Thiel representatives nor Rational Vaccines responded to HuffPost’s requests for comment.) “SIU School of Medicine did not have any involvement in Rational Vaccines’ clinical trial,” Karen Carlson, the university’s spokesperson, told Kaiser Health News. “We have no way of knowing what response would have occurred had they received an injection of salt water instead.”Gill didn’t think regulatory bodies outside of the U.S. would be more accepting of Halford’s unregulated human research, either.

Source: Huffington Post August 30, 2017 21:11 UTC