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Comment by chub500 | Hacker News Reader

By that same logic why wait for any studies on the vaccine at all? Why not just start administering it as soon as it's developed (en masse)?

The rigor is to give the public confidence that we're better off getting the vaccine than not.

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There are many people (like me) who argued for exactly that. We should have had general distribution and ramp up of production as soon as the Phase I studies were done. This could have prevented the second wave we are in, and saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

It's also the case that if you were to screw up on the first approval, if the first vaccine actually wasn't as safe as it needs to be, then most people will be scared of vaccine #2 or #3, regardless of their safety, regardless of how they were produced. And that would cause a huge setback and prolong all the stupidity for years, potentially.

After the Phase 1 data was back, arguably it wouldn’t have been a bad call to give doses for free and gamble on the efficacy even if it turned out to be below 50%.

From an ethical viewpoint, this is incredibly wrong, as vaccines given to healthy people which cause problems later are very very dangerous.

> From an ethical viewpoint, this is incredibly wrong, as vaccines given to healthy people which cause problems later are very very dangerous.

The first two phases are the safety tests, the third one is efficacy (so we knew the vaccine was "safe" after phase 2, we just didn't know the efficacy - that's what the poster above is alluding to).

I hope that extra public confidence is worth hundreds of thousands of deaths resulting from delaying the vaccine by months.

With many millions of people intentionally disregarding simple low-cost precautions and unecessarily exposing themselves now, the population doesn't seem a good case for rolling out an experimental vaccine en masse.

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