If people want to take that option, then I'd be fine with that. But it's not for anyone to decide on behalf of others. If MP has no effect - and it's very possible it's effectiveness is actually zero, as we don't know if it was what saved Giese, - then it is wildly unethical to give unjustified hope to people, especially when this will prevent doctors from trying to find other options that might at least give them a chance.

You need to read the comments. The whole point is that it was not necessarily a success because subsequent tests showed it didn't work, there are several reasons why Ms Giese might have survived including the reasons why previous survivors who didn't get the protocol also survived.

It's not clear even all of those were successes at all, though - at least a couple of the claimed successfully treated patients subsequently died.

Several others had completed most or all of the PEP treatments, and it's not clear if the MP had anything to do with their survival, given other patients have survived without MP in similar circumstances.

13 survivors total, not 13 saved by the Milwaukee protocol.

Notably:

> Prior to 2004, there were only five documented human survivors, all of whom had received the PEP, albeit incomplete or late [5] > In 2004, the first survivor without PEP was reported after this individual had undergone the MP. However, the use of the MP did not increase survival in subsequent cases [6]. Our patient was managed with aggressive supportive care without the MP or steroids. Our patient survived the acute phase of rabies encephalitis and was discharged after five months of intensive nursing care in the hospital.

And:

> Out of the seven reported rabies survivors until 2008, only the index case that used the MP did not receive PEP. Rabies virus was detected in only one case in all of the others that were diagnosed using only the rabies antibody [9]. Our case was diagnosed using both the rabies antibody and highly specific rabies antigen detection tests.

The article points out a number of confounding factors that makes it hard to determine what saved the patient, including potential effects of use of PEP even if unsuccessful in stopping the disease completely (e.g. note that the virus itself was only found in one of the cases of survivors discussed by this article), the high level of other interventions to manage the disease, as well as the potential for genetic variations and the possibility that some of them didn't have Rabies in the first case