Disregarding a way to accelerate vaccine development by months, and save literally hundreds of thousands of lives along the way, because one thoughtlessly applies cliches like "you are supposed to not make people ill", even though the people who you make ill are all volunteers, well aware of the risk, and handsomely compensated for it, is the real total ethical failure.
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.
2,000,000+ people are dead because we didn't take this path.
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.
> The risk to testers under 40 would have been negligible.
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.
"One person died" isn't a refutation, it's just an appeal to emotion.
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.
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.
It lists the total population for each age group. Just the 35 to 44 age group is above 99.98% (given the death counts in younger age groups it's obviously still true if you include them in the calculation):
(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.
Why is it immoral to allow people to take a risk that they explicitly consent to (ensuring they have full knowledge of the potential consequences), but not immoral to let hundreds of thousands or millions more people die that you could have potentially saved if you undertook the challenge trials?
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.
