Having everyone talk about it builds awareness and familiarity in the population, basically ensuring that it becomes politicized, and either guaranteeing it happens next time, or ensures it does not happen, depending on which faction happens to be in power at that time.
I mean, Measles Vaccine is already “controversial” and Measles is worse than covid (in both transmissibility and cfr)
Hi Ericf, thanks for responding! Do you think that it’s possible to run a human challenge trial in the early stage of a deadly pandemic, without any known treatment for the disease, without provoking a major public debate?
If not—if debate and politicization of early-pandemic HCTs is guaranteed—then it seems to me that the right question isn’t whether to debate it, but how to debate it. And that’s only a relevant question if we have accepted the need to debate it.
I haven’t kept up on the state of debate of the trolley problem, but there should be a discussion among bio-ethisists and regulators about the ethics of infecting N people to prevent N x X infections among other people.
The current state seems to be “it is unethical to switch tracks, no matter who is on each track.” Which, for all I know, is the correct answer.
Having everyone talk about it builds awareness and familiarity in the population, basically ensuring that it becomes politicized, and either guaranteeing it happens next time, or ensures it does not happen, depending on which faction happens to be in power at that time. I mean, Measles Vaccine is already “controversial” and Measles is worse than covid (in both transmissibility and cfr)
Hi Ericf, thanks for responding! Do you think that it’s possible to run a human challenge trial in the early stage of a deadly pandemic, without any known treatment for the disease, without provoking a major public debate?
If not—if debate and politicization of early-pandemic HCTs is guaranteed—then it seems to me that the right question isn’t whether to debate it, but how to debate it. And that’s only a relevant question if we have accepted the need to debate it.
I haven’t kept up on the state of debate of the trolley problem, but there should be a discussion among bio-ethisists and regulators about the ethics of infecting N people to prevent N x X infections among other people. The current state seems to be “it is unethical to switch tracks, no matter who is on each track.” Which, for all I know, is the correct answer.