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Comment by azangru | Hacker News Reader

> And we refused to risk any individual life in order to potentially save hundreds of thousands or more

But we are risking individual lives now. Vaccines have side effects. It's never about an individual life, always a calculus of number of lives risked vs number of lives saved, I would think.

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I think the point is that we chose and are still choosing to wait for a hundred people to get infected at random in each efficacy trial, instead of just deliberately infecting a hundred people immediately.

The cost of our approach is that roughly the same proportion of the country's population must bet infected as in the trials.

So, would you volunteer to be deliberately infected with a disease that might or might not kill you in order to save many other lives?

For a nice sum, a whole bunch of people would probably volunteer.

An ethical consideration is whether it is ethical to disproportionately place the poorest (those most in need of a nice sum) at this unknown risk

Given that we have seen that the poorest are the most at risk of dying from the disease, I'm not sure that argument even holds any more. Sadly, it's this obsession with straw man arguments about ethics and equity that's cost the West a million lives in the last year.

Tens of thousands of people have signed up for this at 1daysooner.org. I didn't even volunteer for any of the ongoing trials myself.

That's an difficult and potentially eternal question - some people volunteer to go to space or cross the ocean on a canoe because to them its worth the risk. Some do it for the money. Some are just mad or obsessed.

Back in my time at uni, volunteers had to be unpaid to ensure they do it kf their own free will. Its unclear which is better / worse.

I’m 25 and healthy. If they paid me $1000 and provided medical treatment if necessary I would have volunteered for such a trial last spring.

Honestly, I would. The way things are going down here in my country (Brazil) I will get infected eventually, at least by participating in challenge trials it would help other people.

A lot of people who take trips and meet friends and family (me included) instead of staying home, basically said that they will take the risk of being infected than losing part of life.

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