Archived Facebook Coronavirus Posts: March 17th

[I'm transitioning a bunch of Facebook posts I made on the Coronavirus to my blog.  This was from March 17th]

As you may have heard, one potential vaccine for the coronavirus has already begun early human trials. Nevertheless, it is still thought that widespread availability of a vaccine is still 12-18 months away at minimum.

That may *seem* like a long time, but as someone who spent the last three years thinking my son had a very rare disease and following very intently the development of new potential treatments for that disease, I can assure you that this is *lightning* fast for a new treatment to get FDA approval.

So the question should be asked, why is it so slow to move from the scientific development of a potential cure or vaccine to the actual rollout to the public? Some of this has to do with proving efficacy of the treatment outside of the lab, and some of it has to do with proving the safety of the treatment. But a lot of it also has to do with medical research ethical rules that have been setup to avoid past abuses wherein humans were used as "guinea pigs" in order to drive scientific understanding.

Some of these rules are good and proper in ordinary situations, but are nevertheless not *intrinsically* necessary to medical ethics. That is, there are maybe other ways we could safeguard respect for human life that don't follow these rules strictly.

Given the *massive* economic and societal costs entailed in the prolonged quarantining of huge sectors of society, I think it is the right thing to do to review those ethical rules which are dictating a 12-18 month minimum path to the release of a vaccine. We *might* find some potential shortcuts.