I find this to be a strange take. >Moderna had the mRNA vaccine for Covid ready in about 3 weeks. This means the tech was already there Not quite. While this

I find this to be a strange take. >Moderna had the mRNA vaccine for Covid ready in about 3 weeks. This means the tech was already there Not quite. While this line of research has been occurring for some time, it wasn't quite at that point yet. It wasn't developed and not being used because testing them would be considered unethical. It was developing technology, and Covid came at an opportune time in that things were close enough for researchers to rush things along. >But no, we needed a pandemic and 10 months of testing to start using it, because it wasn't "ethical". Yes, we did need testing before we started using it. It could make everyone sick for all we know. Or perhaps only a select few populations. Testing also allows guidance to be developed on what expect, and what doctors need to look out for. If it were to cause bleeding in people with a certain blood type, for example, then just giving it out would result in huge numbers of people rushing to already overworked ER rooms. Which could just worsen the health crisis we were trying to avoid. There are many good reasons to test treatments even when time is limited >We as a society shy away from doing things which we _know_ would save more lives in the aggregate because we'd have to risk causing much less harm, but harm which we'd be directly responsible for. Y I'll take this logic further and say why not do some DNA alteration experiments on babies? We may have to destroy the specimens after, but so what? A finite number of lives can lead to saving countless lives in the future. Think of the things we could learn about rare diseases, removing harmful genes, improving human health, etc. The millions, even billions of lives we could save and enrich. It's immoral NOT to do that, when the rewards are so great. That's the line of thinking that doctors try to avoid, hence "do no harm". It doesn't matter how common sense it seems, some lines you just don't cross. Because if people do cross those lines, eventually some might use it to justify doing immoral things. There's certainly a lot of rigorous debate about medical ethics, but these decisions are the results of groups of doctors and ethicicts. I'm of the belief that the alternatives have indeed been considered in most cases and the best choice has been made.