My understanding is that there was conscription during WW2, so the comparison is somewhat weakened if we’re not talking about volunteers anyway. But in an armed conflict, I think people have a fair sense that the flying bullets makes it “really rather dangerous”, even if they couldn’t quantify it. My problem with how informed consent can be is around issues like we know there are biases where people have a tendency toward a dichotomy: low risk becomes zero risk in their minds. (To the extent that this applies at the other end of the spectrum, high risk would become near certainty, so further makes the war situation different in nature.)
Can you make an argument that if trials are not suspended a loss of trust in vaccines is more likely than if they are continued?
This seems self evidently true to me. I struggle to envisage a situation where people see caution that they perceive to be excessive and become more reluctant to take vaccines in the future.
Good to have a number for some comparisons. From a quick search, I see the WHO estimates that measles deaths globally fell from 535,600 in 2000 to 124,000 in 2017, but rose to 142,300 in 2018. That seems to show that vaccine uptake can make differences in the tens to hundreds of thousands. Yes, I’m comparing globally to one country, but on the flipside, I’d envisage that negative harms from increased skepticism could aggregate over years-to-decades, and over numerous diseases.
My problem with how informed consent can be is around issues like we know there are biases where people have a tendency toward a dichotomy: low risk becomes zero risk in their minds.
If the changes in risk are very small, in this case of order one in ten thousand, the ethical consequences of people miscalculating that risk are small. We already know that millions of people were willing to take huge risks (<1/100) for altruistic reasons. Why would we assume these volunteers would desist if they “rationally” evaluated the risk at one in ten thousand instead of approximating it at 1 in a hundred thousand?
So for the set of actions that put others in harms way, you believe that the ethics of said action depends on the percent difference between their perceived risk and the actual risk? That is really really weird and far from the point. Say I volunteer for activity A on the assumption that the risk is 1 in a million, but the actual risk is 10 in a million. Then I volunteer for activity B on the assumtion that the risk is 1 in a hundred, but the actual risk is 1 in ten. In both cases the proportion of risk change is a factor of 10, so you would argue they are equally unethical But the change in absolute risk change in activity B was 9%, which is a huge chance of dying! If I am volunteering I am very interested in the absolute change in risk, who cares about the percentage change, because I’m worried about dying not being wrong.
We don’t have to baby people just because they use heuristics to do good.
This seems self evidently true to me. I struggle to envisage a situation where people see caution that they perceive to be excessive and become more reluctant to take vaccines in the future.
People don’t spend that much time thinking about your particular institution’s paricular norms when they assign a trust value (because there are lots of institutions so they don’t have unlimited time). This is the reason courts are built like they are, so people can actually watch the judge deliberate and explain his reasoning. People do not trust courts because juries are statistically good at identifying guilt or because they know the regulations in their jurisdiction in detail. They judge the courts on big noticable surface characteristics that touch their lives and their communities.
They will remember stuff like “did the vaccine work” “did we get it first” and maybe “did people have negative reactions on facebook”. The choices made in one particular trial will be long long forgotten. The UK’s choice to continue the trial gets them more data faster to release a safe vaccine to the genpop. Those are things that touch people. So the UK might experience higher “trust in vaccine institutions” later than the US. It could go the otherway too, but I think the UK choice is stronger in expectation.
Also, the generation who stopped taking measles had forgotten how bad viruses are. I doubt they’ll repeat that mistake after this.
My understanding is that there was conscription during WW2, so the comparison is somewhat weakened if we’re not talking about volunteers anyway. But in an armed conflict, I think people have a fair sense that the flying bullets makes it “really rather dangerous”, even if they couldn’t quantify it. My problem with how informed consent can be is around issues like we know there are biases where people have a tendency toward a dichotomy: low risk becomes zero risk in their minds. (To the extent that this applies at the other end of the spectrum, high risk would become near certainty, so further makes the war situation different in nature.)
This seems self evidently true to me. I struggle to envisage a situation where people see caution that they perceive to be excessive and become more reluctant to take vaccines in the future.
Good to have a number for some comparisons. From a quick search, I see the WHO estimates that measles deaths globally fell from 535,600 in 2000 to 124,000 in 2017, but rose to 142,300 in 2018. That seems to show that vaccine uptake can make differences in the tens to hundreds of thousands. Yes, I’m comparing globally to one country, but on the flipside, I’d envisage that negative harms from increased skepticism could aggregate over years-to-decades, and over numerous diseases.
https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/05-12-2019-more-than-140-000-die-from-measles-as-cases-surge-worldwide
If the changes in risk are very small, in this case of order one in ten thousand, the ethical consequences of people miscalculating that risk are small. We already know that millions of people were willing to take huge risks (<1/100) for altruistic reasons. Why would we assume these volunteers would desist if they “rationally” evaluated the risk at one in ten thousand instead of approximating it at 1 in a hundred thousand?
So for the set of actions that put others in harms way, you believe that the ethics of said action depends on the percent difference between their perceived risk and the actual risk? That is really really weird and far from the point. Say I volunteer for activity A on the assumption that the risk is 1 in a million, but the actual risk is 10 in a million. Then I volunteer for activity B on the assumtion that the risk is 1 in a hundred, but the actual risk is 1 in ten. In both cases the proportion of risk change is a factor of 10, so you would argue they are equally unethical But the change in absolute risk change in activity B was 9%, which is a huge chance of dying! If I am volunteering I am very interested in the absolute change in risk, who cares about the percentage change, because I’m worried about dying not being wrong.
We don’t have to baby people just because they use heuristics to do good.
People don’t spend that much time thinking about your particular institution’s paricular norms when they assign a trust value (because there are lots of institutions so they don’t have unlimited time). This is the reason courts are built like they are, so people can actually watch the judge deliberate and explain his reasoning. People do not trust courts because juries are statistically good at identifying guilt or because they know the regulations in their jurisdiction in detail. They judge the courts on big noticable surface characteristics that touch their lives and their communities.
They will remember stuff like “did the vaccine work” “did we get it first” and maybe “did people have negative reactions on facebook”. The choices made in one particular trial will be long long forgotten. The UK’s choice to continue the trial gets them more data faster to release a safe vaccine to the genpop. Those are things that touch people. So the UK might experience higher “trust in vaccine institutions” later than the US. It could go the otherway too, but I think the UK choice is stronger in expectation.
Also, the generation who stopped taking measles had forgotten how bad viruses are. I doubt they’ll repeat that mistake after this.