Before Peter Thiel invested, research on herpes vaccine began in US hotel rooms

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The researcher who conducted a controversial 2016 herpes vaccine trial on the island of St. Kitts without federal safety oversight had secretly begun the trial in the US three years earlier-in hotel rooms not far from his academic lab. That's according to a new investigation by Kaiser Health News.

That researcher, the late Dr. William Halford of Southern Illinois University, administered shots to at least eight people with herpes in 2013. Without any federal or institutional approval or oversight, he administered the shots himself in rooms at a Holiday Inn Express and a Crowne Plaza Hotel within a short drive from SIU. Halford, who passed away from cancer in June of this year, was a microbiologist, not a physician.

Several people who received the vaccine have since complained to the FDA and SIU, reporting potential side effects. Those include large, painful rashes and becoming infected with a strain of herpes different from their initial infection.

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