Potential counterargument against the above: Well, yes, any individual pharma company might only have one shot, but as a society we could have many different untested vaccine candidates going out to people all at once. We already have a risk diversification mechanism by having many different vaccine candidate options, so we don’t need to further avoid risk by doing trials on all of them. And we also don’t have to give untested vaccines to literally everybody, just small populations at first.
Response to the counterargument: If the proposal is to give a bunch of untested vaccine candidates to people early on in the pandemic before knowing for sure how they work, haven’t you just reinvented clinical trials? Maybe a conception of them that is faster and to a larger population, but still fundamentally the same thing?
Potential counterargument against the above: Well, yes, any individual pharma company might only have one shot, but as a society we could have many different untested vaccine candidates going out to people all at once. We already have a risk diversification mechanism by having many different vaccine candidate options, so we don’t need to further avoid risk by doing trials on all of them. And we also don’t have to give untested vaccines to literally everybody, just small populations at first.
Response to the counterargument: If the proposal is to give a bunch of untested vaccine candidates to people early on in the pandemic before knowing for sure how they work, haven’t you just reinvented clinical trials? Maybe a conception of them that is faster and to a larger population, but still fundamentally the same thing?