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Comment by mkramlich | Hacker News Reader

> , we haven't had a vaccine for the last 10,000 years of human civilisation, so what's another 10?

If you had a family member with a devastating disease like this, right now, you might not be so glib about waiting another 10 years. For some folks, they don't have another 10 years to spare.

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I'd politely disagree. My mother is already showing early stages of Alzheimer's, and while I honestly hope for a cure or even for treatments to arrest the progression of the disease, with medicine I think it's something that should be done right the first time.

Honestly, I am tempted to want to push this out myself. In the end though, given the medical, legal, and social (note: anti-vaccine crowds) implications of pushing out a faulty drug, I think in the long run it's better to wait and make sure it's safe first before opening treatment to the public.

Better for whom, exactly? Clearly not better for the people who could have been helped in the meantime.

Well, take all the ways that it could be unsafe, and (by some measure) estimate some utilitarian cost of rolling the drug out early for each individual person for each unsafe scenario. Now multiply each of those costs by the probability of that unsafe outcome happening for a given individual, sum those up and place them in column A. Now take the probability that the drug is effective and multiply it by each individual's probability of getting Alzheimer's, and then multiply that by the utilitarian penalty for that person having Alzheimer's. Put that in column B. Subtract column B from column A and put that in column C. Any row who has a positive value in column C - that is for whom it's better to wait and vet the treatment's safety.

Practically speaking, these will be people who know they are genetically predisposed to Alzheimer's and get the vaccine before they show any signs.

Now, if we could actually run the calculations I mentioned above, the problem would disappear because we wouldn't simply say "approved as safe" or "rejected as unsafe". We'd just keep a running tally of the odds of safety and give the treatment to people according to the desperation of their individual case. But unfortunately, that's not the world we live in.

I can't reply to the five or so comments that say the same thing but I'll put it to you this way: My grandparents are both dead of cancer-related complications in the last few months, they didn't have ten years to wait for a cure. I very much can relate and empathise with those who have to wait. But it's still better late and working than never.

If you have a family member suffering from the disease or have a high chance of getting the disease, the said family member can be enrolled in the trial instead of waiting 10 years for the final product.

In medicine, safety is paramount. This is not a Node.js start-up where you can push 100 updates in a day.

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