The pay for brave vaccine testers could have literally been $1m and we’d have saved several trillion bucks and potentially over a million lives. Hell, make it $10m or $100m and you'd still save a ton of money.
We've done this for several other viruses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_challenge_study
You're really going to force testers to potentially pick up the placebo, and then inject them with COVID19 forcefully? I mean yeah, it'd work, but its generally considered immoral under today's philosophy of science.
1) death is but only the worst outcome. Being on the space shuttle does bring risk, yes, but not a 50/50 chance of a significant impact to your general health.
2) you'll end up testing the vaccines largely on marginalized population and people with heavy financial problems, misrepresenting the population at large and showing biased result.
I would sign up for this in a heartbeat. Not only for the cash payment -- but you'd be a local hero and you could feel good for the rest of your life about taking a small risk to save the lives of many ill or elderly people.
The alternative that we chose was hundreds of thousands of more deaths and millions of more cases. From people who didn't sign up for it.
And if it wasn't immoral, what is the dollar limit?
Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos will never risk their life for "only" a million bucks. Find a depressed + suicidal dude somewhere else, and they may be personally willing to risk their life for just $100.
Making an industry of people who are willing to harm themselves for money is... probably not the business we should be encouraging. And that's assuming everyone is "playing nice". At a minimum, it means that we'll be inclined to start experimenting upon the poor and depressed (and then shedding away moral qualms because they signed a piece of paper).
Historically speaking in the USA, we have legacies like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, where African Americans were chosen as the control group and lied to about getting a Syphilis treatment: leading to a generation+ long distrust in science.
Yeah yeah, we can't "assume" scientists will be racist jackasses today. But... we still have to account for what happened in our history and why certain testing methodologies have become taboo.
I've thought for similar questions that a required baseline would be to at least have a society that provides a viable minimum social safety net, as well as free healthcare. When external conditions compel people to risk their health for survival, it is impossible to ensure sound ethics.
The point about ensuring that science and scientists can be trusted in the future is also an excellent point.
It would be quite possible for it to clearly be informed consent also, at least to the extent the disease was characterized at that point in time.
The reason people keep bringing it up is that the consequences of the pandemic have been much worse than the consequences of allowing a few thousand people to intentionally expose themselves to an infection in a controlled setting¹. It's not guaranteed that challenge trials would have mitigated the pandemic, but it's weird to just outright circumscribe the possibility when the ongoing downside is huge.
1. I use the odd phrasing here because lots of people pretty much choose to expose themselves to the infection anyway; maybe not explicitly, but close enough.
What's being proposed here is for people to sign up and then inject a potentially deadly disease into them.
Sure, the scale is massively different for a young healthy person: "susceptible to COVID" would mean a moderate chance of catching the disease (growing over time), and then a small chance of death or previous complications. But the "susceptibility" is also a "health condition" with nonzero risk-of-death.
And for society as a whole, COVID passed cancer as a cause of death last year, and in January 2021 has been killing about twice as many people as all cancers combined.
So "diagnosed-with-cancer" versus "susceptible-to-COVID" shouldn't be that different in terms of the kinds of risks we'd let informed people take to address that danger.
This means you are choosing people to murder.
I honestly haven't thought deeply about the ethics, but it's really concerning that it has become such a hard rule that preventing people from injuring themselves in a particular way (we don't prevent lots of other forms of injury) is somehow obviously superior to letting tens of thousands of people die for lack of information.
It won't hurt the at risk groups to start up high volume manufacturing earlier (it will likely help them), and there is a benefit to everyone each time anyone is vaccinated (the reduction in transmission efficiency).
Optimizing deployment of the virus to bored 20 year olds may be popular among bored 20 year olds, but it isn't the best public health strategy.
Do you think the vaccines being distributed right now were manufactured more than a few weeks ago or something?
Remember it wasn't a given that mRNA vaccines were going to work, we were lucky.
What proportion of approved vaccines in general have such radically different responses in different age groups or demographics?
People can decide for themselves to take risks. You may not agree with the choices they make and that is your problem. Not theirs.
It's as if when there are some "professional" ethicists in the area who give "professional" ethical guidance, people lose their natural moral sense, and defer to their "professional" guidance no matter how silly it is if you apply even modicum of scrutiny.
The risk to testers under 40 would have been negligible. I'm not being flippant about other peoples' lives -- I would have signed up myself if the compensation was high enough.
Luke Letlow (age 41) says otherwise, since he's dead. Okay, he's above 40, but he's high-profile and easy for me to remember. Plenty of sub 40 year olds have died.
Even among the survivors... plenty of young and healthy 20-30 year olds are having month-long recoveries, unable to breath at their old capacity.
Purposefully damaging the control group (who by definition, must NOT receive the vaccine) is immoral. Whether people in the control group believe in the potential harms of the disease or not.
Under 40 the survival rate is 99.98% for everyone -- including the already ill. If you screened for comorbidities and gave people great healthcare, you could get that 99.999% or higher. And save millions of lives (and trillions of dollars) by doing so.
I doubt that. But I'm not entirely sure how to calculate the numbers you just said.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
I realize this page changes, so I've taken a screenshot here: https://imgur.com/0iM5FHC
This is the chart of who died in January 2021. Yes, most deaths are aged 65+, but there's been deaths in all age categories. I doubt its 99.98% as you suggest (especially since the current case-mortality-rate is ~2.5%, at least for my state)
The official CDC numbers are stratified from 35 to 44, I'm not entirely sure who you are citing to get "below 40" age groups.
(1-7057/41659144)*100=99.983%
I expect the individual probability of surviving infection is not that high for each member of the group though. It's not clear if that meaning is intended anywhere above.
That's the total population of all 35 to 44 year olds in all of the USA.
> 99.983%
That's 0.02% of all 35 to 44 year olds have died, including those who never had COVID. IN ONE MONTH, not including the people who died two months ago, or 3 months ago.
It's for the entire period of the pandemic.
You are correct in pointing out that it isn't looking at deaths/infection.
A few bad cases and deaths that were consented to, versus hundreds of thousands to millions of cases and deaths from people that didn't consent. This morality scale doesn't make sense.