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> it'd be pointless to run a challenge trial full of low-risk individuals.

This is binary all-or-nothing thinking. It considers 90% the same as 0%, since both are not 100%.

Testing on healthy young people you learn how a normal immune system reacts to a vaccine candidate. High risk groups mostly have similar immune systems.

Even if somehow you could only vaccinate everyone under 60, that would do enormous good stopping the spread.

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Another way of making the point: we did COVID challenge trials on monkeys first, because their immune systems are a decent model for that 80-year-old human's. Well, a 30-year-old human is an even better model of an 80-year-old human. A challenge trial on young people wouldn't prove everything, but it would give a high-information signal quickly.

> This is binary all-or-nothing thinking. It considers 90% the same as 0%, since both are not 100%.

Thinking is not just "binary or not"; there are degrees. If exposing that group of people would be 90% pointless, it's not much less out of the question than if it were 100% pointless.

I like your recursive "degrees of binarity" argument :)

You're right about the principle, of course. I just think it would be "10% pointless", and thus well worth doing.

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