From the Comments

The context is that human challenge trials were “ethically fraught” but, Sure writes:

…I think we had more than a few instances in history where restricting movement, shuttering houses of worship, and stratifying the economy into favored and disfavored sectors was considered ethically fraught.

I mean we know that limiting visitation to old folks shortens their lives. We know that child abuse becomes harder to find the fewer the number of folks who lay eyes on them each day. We know that initimate partner violence increases when the housing market gets frozen. And we know that suicides crest when businesses go under.

Yet no such epistemic humility and wariness followed with public health recommendations to be tried on a scale reserved hitherto for literal wars and genocides. And we blindly went ahead full speed.

Or consider even the better defined but wildly more mundane issue: proof of vaccination. For decades health ethicists told us that merely revealing a patient’s name, let alone which medications they have taken, was an unconscionable ethical violation. One which we instituted balkanized medical systems to manage and where the cost has been literal lives lost as we have had untold numbers of patients fall through the cracks thanks to duplicate profiles, failure of providers to communicate, and of course scads and scads of useful data locked away from effective statistical analysis that could spot patterns of medical error.

Yet when the powers that be decided that we needed vaccine passports so we could enjoy dining again? Well, every waiter in the country becomes a safe repository of PHI.

No formal study. No deliberations. Precious little if any publications.

And even then, it went only for what was the most expedient option for the enlightened. No ability to get an antibody titer card for medical equivalence. No ability to substitute PCR results with a physician evaluation of recent disease recovery.

Professional medical ethics are bogus. There is no consistency and the entire profession serves to pander to the prejudices of the educated.

Comments

Comments for this post are closed