Covid Guinea Pigs

 Covid Guinea Pigs

 

Anti-vaxxers should know that they are volunteering to be guinea pigs in a virus exposure experiment. Decades from now doctors will examine them to determine the long-term health effects of covid.

Medical researchers call this sort of thing a “natural experiment”. It’s unethical to assign people to one, but when it happens by accident or error, then it’s an opportunity for medicine to acquire valuable data. Therefore the covid guinea pigs can rest assured that they will be useful to Big Pharma.

          Perhaps we should express gratitude for their self-sacrifice of health and lifespan for the advance of medical science.

 

 

Comments:

 

BTB:

Yes, we should.

 

LF:

Well, you can’t object to a self-selected group of guinea-pigs.

 

NH:

That’s what makes this natural experiment ethical. But there are two problems:

1) This is not informed consent.

2) The virus volunteers, by the uninformed gift of their bodies to the undead nanoscopic parasites, might breed variants which then infect non-volunteers.