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Also consider this: Ebola seems to have about a 60% mortality rate. This means that if he survives you can't credit the drug and since you don't know how effe

Also consider this: Ebola seems to have about a 60% mortality rate. This means that if he survives you can't credit the drug and since you don't know how effective it is, you can't blame death on it either. Not until you have more data. But this means the decision is political and rightly so. I don't know how I feel about foreign aid workers being the first to try the drug. On one hand they are politically safe. On the other hand, it looks like Western Privilege. These things have no good answers. Sometimes we are left choosing between bad possibilities.

true_religion 12y ago
Isn't a 60% mortality rate particularly high? And if you give someone a drug and they consequently show a reversal of their symptoms instead of a slow die off as immune response kicks in, doesn't that pretty heavily imply that the drug worked? I'm not against full clinical trials and the like, but I doubt that's a possibility with an epedemic like disease like ebola.
- einhverfr 12y ago
  It's very high, but it is at a point where you cannot credit or blame the drug for success or failure in a specific case. You need aggregate data. The point is about the political vs the scientific perspective and that these are not aligned.