Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly
I&#x27;ve said this before here and got downvoted for it, but bioethicists as a profession are responsible for more death than pretty much anything else I can quickly think of.<p>People are dying from heart disease all the time, very often in predictable conditions. Literally millions every year. Statistically this means we should hear about such failed procedures many many more times than we do now - there is literally no downside from doing this much more often, and a strict upside: a chance to live longer and a definite advance in medicine leading to other lives saved. Sure, it may mean more stress for a dying patient, but quite a few would prefer their death have some meaning. But they can&#x27;t chose this because it&#x27;s not &quot;ethical&quot;.<p>Moderna had the mRNA vaccine for Covid ready in about 3 weeks. This means the tech was already there - I&#x27;d really like to see an argument where we had three major companies create mRNA vaccines, only one failed (harmlessly!) but we shouldn&#x27;t have used this technology a few years early. mRNA tech is incredibly versatile - it should have applications from curing cold to curing cancer. But no, we needed a pandemic and 10 months of testing to start using it, because it wasn&#x27;t &quot;ethical&quot;.<p>We knew from month 1 that the young and healthy are not hit hard by Covid. Mortality in those groups was always comparable to flu, more or less. But we didn&#x27;t do challenge trials. We wasted ... I have to take a break from typing, tbh, I&#x27;m overwhelmed. We wasted almost a year while literal millions died while wondering if Covid is transmitted by touch, aerosols or airborne when we could have fixed this in two weeks with a bunch of 25 year olds. We spent half a year before even realizing masks help, and we still don&#x27;t know for sure how much and what&#x27;s the difference between each kind. We had Omicron - we knew it was different, we had good reason to think it&#x27;s not significantly worse from the start, but we still had a _lot_ of questions. But two years from the start of the pandemic we STILL didn&#x27;t put a bunch of healthy volunteers through a completely harmless study to find out things early. Because it wouldn&#x27;t have been &quot;ethical&quot;.<p>This isn&#x27;t ethics we&#x27;re talking about. It&#x27;s pure and unadulterated cowardice. We as a society shy away from doing things which we _know_ would save more lives in the aggregate because we&#x27;d have to risk causing much less harm, but harm which we&#x27;d be directly responsible for. Joe from the street would be excused from making these decisions, but when you deal with the people directly charged by the society from making these decision, it&#x27;s just failure to do their job. And in a supermajority of case we&#x27;re dealing with volunteers anyways.<p>If you feel like reading more about how stupid the whole system is: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;08&#x2F;29&#x2F;my-irb-nightmare&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;08&#x2F;29&#x2F;my-irb-nightmare&#x2F;</a>