> you no longer have a control group if you're at all ethical. > You cannot keep a working treatment from people just to do more science, that is deeply and fu

> you no longer have a control group if you're at all ethical. > You cannot keep a working treatment from people just to do more science, that is deeply and fundamentally unethical. I see this position put out there a lot and generally go unchallenged. For the record some people think the opposite: that it was unethical to unblind the placebo group so early. At the time you could estimate that continuing the placebo group might lead to ~60 unnecessary deaths from Covid-19 and a few hundred more serious cases. That is in the lucky scenario where the early success held. But in all scenarios, in return for a few dozen volunteers risking their lives, billions of people would benefit from randomized, placebo-controlled trial data which the NIH itself calls the "gold standard" as to "whether or not a treatment is safe and effective". IMO the harms we have gone through from flying in the dark (people underhyping/overhyping the vaccines), multiplied by the number of people involved, make this a case where unblinding was unethical. It is very easy to imagine that far more life was lost in the general population from being in the dark than was saved by unblinding the volunteer study population. (There's also the issue of whether or not it would have been practical to keep the participants blinded. I think that's a challenging topic of its own orthogonal to the ethical question.)