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Why should only the financially desperate be asked to sacrifice for their species? What a repugnant stance you've adopted.

The_rationalist 6y ago
You can randomize it in an authoritarian way if you reject here the free market, the way of selection matter far less than the discussion of how much lives could be saved. What a repugnant stance you've adopted. Thinking like you think is consenting to mass murder, do you realize it ? Here's my calculus: The phase I trial has approximately lasted 2 months. I checked the number of total deaths from 01 may to 01 July -> https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#total-deaths https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#... This give us 277,145 human deaths in this trial period. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_due_to_COVID-19#Mortality_by_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_due_to_COVID-19#Mort... mortality rate for a ~20 years old should be at least lower than 0.1%. With all those data in mind, here's the reasoning: The metric of effectiveness for this Moderna vaccine candidate is epistemologically LOW. They use fuzzy heuristics of matching approximately the immune response of naturally recovering patients as a claim of being effective. So firstly this reasoning is simplistic especially since researchers do not understand precisely how the working immune response work. So there is a risk of the vaccine to be a disappointment. If it is, those 277,145 human lifes would have been wasted and far more will die until we find the true vaccin. But what you need to understand is that researchers are condemned to match the existing immune response as otherwise, without testing on infected young humans, they cannot predict the vaccine expected performance. This alone is far enough for defending that they should have tested on a few dozen of infected patients the effectiveness. If they did: two possible scenarios: (lets suppose they tested 30 humans in their twenties that would make 0.3% of chance of deaths (comparatively to 277,145 human deaths) and the likelihood would be actually far lower as they would be actively monitored) scenario A) the vaccine doesn't work and it shows empirically, it save them weeks of evidence and therefore make them reconsider another paradigm for the virus. That alone would save at the very least thousands of lives by allowing the true vaccine to be found earlier. So you must realize that your "repugnant stance" of inaction is responsible in this likely scenario of far more deaths, sadly numbers quickly become unproportional to the emotional empathic response for a homo sapiens, this kind of brain failure honestly give a taste of vomit in my mouth, but yeah everybody is victim of this cognitive bias, even myself so no offense. In the second scenario, the empiricism would show them that their vaccine works: here again it would accelerate the delivery, and crucially the data would give them insights and allow for far better fine tuning of how the vaccine works and the optimal dosage. Is is not unreasonable to think that such speedup would allow to save a similar order of magnitude than 277,145 human deaths but could actually be far more (imagine 6 months of work saved y avoiding empirically invalidated or fine tuned research directions ? Even if it were to be lower, even if the data sped up the research by only one day (an insanely pessimistic view that I only show to defend your reasoning to the extreme, to its limit) would still save more than 5000 lives which is indeed far bigger than the likely lower than 0.3% of death rate for ~30 persons, so even in the ridiculous limit we talk about 5000+ vs 0.3 death.
- simiones 6y ago
  What is the error rate of the immune system response currently used, compared to actual immune response? If it is small, then the value of infecting humans directly goes way down. Further, what is the probability that the control group and the vaccine groups will not be exposed naturally and accidentally to Covid19 during the Phase II, Phase III studies? If they are likely to be accidentally exposed, then purposefully exposing them has even less value. Given the current infection rates in the US, this likelihood seems pretty good. The 277,145 number is meaningless. The vaccine was not known to help in any way 2 months ago. For all we knew at the time, if we had started giving this to people on mass 2 months ago, we would have had 300k deaths from the vaccine by now. Then, the vaccine is not yet known to be effective. We only have proof that it is safe, but we don't have rigorous control studies showing that it is effective yet (we need the Phase II & III trials for that). Before that, there is only a "hunch" that it will help at all, so taking death numbers for the next few months is also going to be meaningless. Finally, your "even if the data sped up the research by only one day" calculation is pure sophism. Why not assume that the data could slow down the research? What if one of the patients dies because of complications after being infected, and that affects team morale, slowing down the research? What if one of the researchers accidentally gets sick themselves because of improper handling of the live virus, again slowing down the research? The final point is: we are already rushing this. There are good reasons we have stopped testing drugs on volunteers, we have a horrible history behind us of the effects, often without much better results (and often much worse results) than current methods. There methods we have for estimating actual immunity based on immune system response have been studied for some time and are considered good. Putting people's lives in danger is needless complication, more likely to slow everything down than to speed it up.

The_rationalist 6y ago

You can randomize it in an authoritarian way if you reject here the free market, the way of selection matter far less than the discussion of how much lives could be saved. What a repugnant stance you've adopted. Thinking like you think is consenting to mass murder, do you realize it ? Here's my calculus: The phase I trial has approximately lasted 2 months. I checked the number of total deaths from 01 may to 01 July -> https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#total-deaths https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#... This give us 277,145 human deaths in this trial period. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_due_to_COVID-19#Mortality_by_age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortality_due_to_COVID-19#Mort... mortality rate for a ~20 years old should be at least lower than 0.1%. With all those data in mind, here's the reasoning: The metric of effectiveness for this Moderna vaccine candidate is epistemologically LOW. They use fuzzy heuristics of matching approximately the immune response of naturally recovering patients as a claim of being effective. So firstly this reasoning is simplistic especially since researchers do not understand precisely how the working immune response work. So there is a risk of the vaccine to be a disappointment. If it is, those 277,145 human lifes would have been wasted and far more will die until we find the true vaccin. But what you need to understand is that researchers are condemned to match the existing immune response as otherwise, without testing on infected young humans, they cannot predict the vaccine expected performance. This alone is far enough for defending that they should have tested on a few dozen of infected patients the effectiveness. If they did: two possible scenarios: (lets suppose they tested 30 humans in their twenties that would make 0.3% of chance of deaths (comparatively to 277,145 human deaths) and the likelihood would be actually far lower as they would be actively monitored) scenario A) the vaccine doesn't work and it shows empirically, it save them weeks of evidence and therefore make them reconsider another paradigm for the virus. That alone would save at the very least thousands of lives by allowing the true vaccine to be found earlier. So you must realize that your "repugnant stance" of inaction is responsible in this likely scenario of far more deaths, sadly numbers quickly become unproportional to the emotional empathic response for a homo sapiens, this kind of brain failure honestly give a taste of vomit in my mouth, but yeah everybody is victim of this cognitive bias, even myself so no offense. In the second scenario, the empiricism would show them that their vaccine works: here again it would accelerate the delivery, and crucially the data would give them insights and allow for far better fine tuning of how the vaccine works and the optimal dosage. Is is not unreasonable to think that such speedup would allow to save a similar order of magnitude than 277,145 human deaths but could actually be far more (imagine 6 months of work saved y avoiding empirically invalidated or fine tuned research directions ? Even if it were to be lower, even if the data sped up the research by only one day (an insanely pessimistic view that I only show to defend your reasoning to the extreme, to its limit) would still save more than 5000 lives which is indeed far bigger than the likely lower than 0.3% of death rate for ~30 persons, so even in the ridiculous limit we talk about 5000+ vs 0.3 death.

simiones 6y ago
What is the error rate of the immune system response currently used, compared to actual immune response? If it is small, then the value of infecting humans directly goes way down. Further, what is the probability that the control group and the vaccine groups will not be exposed naturally and accidentally to Covid19 during the Phase II, Phase III studies? If they are likely to be accidentally exposed, then purposefully exposing them has even less value. Given the current infection rates in the US, this likelihood seems pretty good. The 277,145 number is meaningless. The vaccine was not known to help in any way 2 months ago. For all we knew at the time, if we had started giving this to people on mass 2 months ago, we would have had 300k deaths from the vaccine by now. Then, the vaccine is not yet known to be effective. We only have proof that it is safe, but we don't have rigorous control studies showing that it is effective yet (we need the Phase II & III trials for that). Before that, there is only a "hunch" that it will help at all, so taking death numbers for the next few months is also going to be meaningless. Finally, your "even if the data sped up the research by only one day" calculation is pure sophism. Why not assume that the data could slow down the research? What if one of the patients dies because of complications after being infected, and that affects team morale, slowing down the research? What if one of the researchers accidentally gets sick themselves because of improper handling of the live virus, again slowing down the research? The final point is: we are already rushing this. There are good reasons we have stopped testing drugs on volunteers, we have a horrible history behind us of the effects, often without much better results (and often much worse results) than current methods. There methods we have for estimating actual immunity based on immune system response have been studied for some time and are considered good. Putting people's lives in danger is needless complication, more likely to slow everything down than to speed it up.