Item — HN Reader

The point that challenge trials don't determine safety is accurate, but most of the article is again arguing about the ethics rather than the efficacy. Imagine if volunteers were not permitted by ethicists to storm the beaches of Normandy because their safety could not be guaranteed.

Our current testing protocol requires letting the virus rampage through the population before the trials will achieve statistical significance, which is surely more unethical than deliberately exposing a small number of people.

1 comments

I tend to agree in the case of Covid, but I'll play devil's advocate...

Suppose we replace Covid with "car crashes" and vaccine with "seatbelts". This is a good analogy because crashes are rare and we can't cure trauma (like on Star Trek). It would be absurd to deliberately cause car crashes in order to study the effect of seatbelts. For the experimental group, there will still be some minor injuries. For the control group, many will die.

That sounds more like doing challenge trials for an ebola vaccine, for which I'd expect you'd get very few volunteers. Still though, if there are people willing to risk sacrificing themselves, and the information would definitely save lives, we should let people do that for the greater good. The world's militaries throw away far more lives for far less benefit.