Item — HN Reader

People join the military not knowing whether or not they will ever go to war, yet they still join. By doing so they risk death, dismemberment, and all manner of long term disability under the belief that doing so makes everyone else safer.

If exposing a few people on purpose is a moral wrong, then surely allowing millions of them to contract it by accident so that a few people in your RCT can become infected by chance is a moral abomination.

1 comments

I don't follow, how is it worse to reach a lot of people in case some of them catch it in an unrelated manner worse than infecting them on purpose?

A traditional trial requires you to wait for the pandemic to spread in order to get enough positive people in your trial for significance. It's effectively like "challenging" random people in the public in the hopes that some of them are in your treatment group.

Sure, and betting that someone will die is still way way better than murdering them.

Actively preventing someone from saving a third person is murder. Even if there is risk involved.

Who is preventing whom from being saved?

The people and government organizations that opposed challenge trials are preventing the participants in challenge trails from saving people who actually did die from Covid.

I'm not sure that's correct as the safety data had been the last to come in. You still have to run a large phase 3 trial to collect safety data, challenge trial or not.