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We've subsequently learned that even young healthy and initially asymptomatic people can become permanently ill from so called "long COVID". The ethicists were
by mantap 6y ago
We've subsequently learned that even young healthy and initially asymptomatic people can become permanently ill from so called "long COVID". The ethicists were right to say no.
- moultano 6y agoPeople join the military not knowing whether or not they will ever go to war, yet they still join. By doing so they risk death, dismemberment, and all manner of long term disability under the belief that doing so makes everyone else safer. If exposing a few people on purpose is a moral wrong, then surely allowing millions of them to contract it by accident so that a few people in your RCT can become infected by chance is a moral abomination.
- StavrosK 6y agoI don't follow, how is it worse to reach a lot of people in case some of them catch it in an unrelated manner worse than infecting them on purpose?
- moultano 6y agoA traditional trial requires you to wait for the pandemic to spread in order to get enough positive people in your trial for significance. It's effectively like "challenging" random people in the public in the hopes that some of them are in your treatment group.
- StavrosK 6y agoSure, and betting that someone will die is still way way better than murdering them.
- benchaney 6y agoActively preventing someone from saving a third person is murder. Even if there is risk involved.
- StavrosK 6y agoWho is preventing whom from being saved?
- benchaney 6y agoThe people and government organizations that opposed challenge trials are preventing the participants in challenge trails from saving people who actually did die from Covid.
- mantap 6y agoI'm not sure that's correct as the safety data had been the last to come in. You still have to run a large phase 3 trial to collect safety data, challenge trial or not.
- benchaney 6y agoThis makes no sense to me. Preventing challenge trials causes more people to die and become permanently ill. What ethical system are you operating under where that is morally preferable? FWIW, ethicists were split, but mostly on board with HCTs. It was mostly the government that was opposed.
- jedimastert 6y agoIIRC, we were fairly unaware of the long term effects at that point. All we really knew was that age had a factor. So a bunch of healthy young people would have signed up, thinking that the chances of harm, even if they got the placebo, were fairly low, when in reality there were significant chances of being permanently (or at least very long term) maimed. Essentially, no one signing up for the trial would have been properly able to give consent, because no one knew the real consequences.
- benchaney 6y agoNobody knew what the long term effects were, but we knew that there was uncertainty about them. Informed consent doesn't require perfect information. Just the best possible information, and a fair appraisal of uncertainty.
- guscost 6y agoAs a young and healthy challenge trial volunteer, who is now watching the panic metastasize into an existential threat to free civilization, no they were not. Blocking these trials is the worst miscarriage of ethics that I have ever seen.