I take your point, but calling the comparison "lies" based on the possibility of long-term implications we know nothing about seems like a big stretch to me. We don't know the long-term effects of 5G either.

> If scientists infected a bunch of 20 year olds with Covid in 2020 and by 2050, 40% of them die of lung cancer before the age of 50, is that something you'd be cool with?

If it saves the lives of a bunch of nurses in the process? I don't know—I think I'm cool with a possibility of it, yes. Especially when those same people could also catch the virus naturally.

Also, I edited my original post to add a link to the Vox article. It's quite a bit longer / more expansive, and worth a read.

> I take your point, but calling the comparison "lies" based on the possibility of long-term implications we know nothing about seems like a big stretch to me.

I had gone through my post and removed all the places where I called it "lies" because I intended to say that this arose from ignorance rather than malice, albeit irresponsible ignorance from journalists whose responsibility it is to share information. I must have missed that one, my apologies for the accusation.

> We don't know the long-term effects of 5G either.

Geez, did you get this from Vox too? The bands used for 5G didn't just spring into existence: they've been around and used[1], albeit deployed on much smaller scales than 5G will be. We have long-term data on the effects of adjacent bands, and a few different ways of modeling how electromagnetic radiation affects the body. The data we have is certainly from much smaller deployments than 5G will be, so it's true we don't know all the long-term effects of 5G, but we at least have enough data to put some bounds on how horribly 5G could go wrong. For starters, we know that it doesn't have a 40% chance of killing everyone exposed to it in the next 30 years with lung cancer, because an effect that large would show up even in the more limited data we already have. And if it does turn out to cause some problem with even a minute fraction of that severity, we can turn off the 5G and stop the cause of the problem.

We don't even have a clear lock on the short term mortality rate of coronavirus and we can't stop the spread with the flip of a switch. Where, exactly, is your confidence coming from here?

> If it saves the lives of a bunch of nurses in the process? I don't know—I think I'm cool with a possibility of it, yes.

> Especially when those same people could also catch the virus naturally.

The worst-hit place in the US is NYC, with 141,754 confirmed cases currently. Even if we assume unconfirmed cases 5 times that, we're still talking single-digit percentages of the population infected. And cases are going down. So yes, people could catch the virus naturally, or, as is much more likely, they could not catch the virus, if we continue taking the recommended measures that are working.

Certainly populations like health workers working directly with the infected are at much higher risk than the general population, but there's still a very significant chance they don't get infected. And even if the chance of them not getting infected were negligible, the solution would be to give them proper PPE, training, and other protections, not to say, "Hey you're probably going to get it any way, so let's just deliberately infect you to test vaccines that may not work."

[1] https://ethw.org/Millimeter_Waves

5G was, in hindsight, not the best example to throw in there. It came to mind because because I was having an orthogonal discussion on Hacker News a few months ago about 5G safety and radiation modelling. One commenter there said something like (heavily paraphrasing):

> You cannot tell me what effect 5G will have on the body in 50 years, because no one has tested it. Who knows what might happen?

And y'know what? Technically speaking, he or she is absolutely right: despite our best modelling, we can't really know what deploying 5G at this scale will do in 50 years, and we won't know until 50 years from now! All we can say is, this are what we've extrapolated from the models we have.

Is there specific evidence to suggest that COVID-19 will cause extremely high rates of lung cancer in 30 years? If not, we're just in the messy realm of "anything could happen," which is both true and not particularly useful.

I think you have to compare the (very real!) risks of a challenge trial with the risks of not doing a challenge trial. Maybe it does only speed up development by two months, and the number of health care workers and other members of the public who will die in that time is low enough to not be worth risking the lives of study participants. But that is a question we need to actually look at and consider!

> Is there specific evidence to suggest that COVID-19 will cause extremely high rates of lung cancer in 30 years?

Perhaps not "extremely high", but there are lots of other cases where viruses attacking human tissue much less severely are known to cause cancer. HSV causing cervical cancer is probably the most obvious example, but there are many others.

This is well outside my area of expertise, but what I've read leads me to believe that the way viruses reproduce is particularly prone to resulting in mutations in the human cells it attacks.

It would surprise me a bit if Covid19 didn't increase the chance of cancer at some level, although it might be a very small effect.

> I think you have to compare the (very real!) risks of a challenge trial with the risks of not doing a challenge trial. Maybe it does only speed up development by two months, and the number of health care workers and other members of the public who will die in that time is low enough to not be worth risking the lives of study participants. But that is a question we need to actually look at and consider!

That's true. No questions should ever be off the table.

But it didn't sound much like asking a question when you said upthread, "I'm honestly a little surprised there's even a debate about this. The choice seems pretty clear to me." That's why I responded the way I did.

I'm surprised there's even a debate about whether it's ethical in theory. As in, I see doctors overly attached to the "do no harm" mantra to the point where the alternative isn't being looked at.

I didn't mean to imply a cost-benefit analysis shouldn't be done.

> Even if we assume unconfirmed cases 5 times that, we're still talking single-digit percentages of the population infected.

Wasn't you point just that we shouldn't assume? I know that there are models looking at a possibility for only 1% of cases being confirmed. That's been in Sweden and not NYC, but just throwing a 5 out there doesn't make a lot of sense.

> Okay, what number do you think is the worst possible case? Is there a reason to believe that there's a nearly 100% chance that people will get infected?

Based on the number of people testing positive for the antibodies ([0] something like ~21% of random tests in New York), and given that the average estimated R0 is really high, I think ~100% of people being infected by this time next year is a pretty reasonable assumption. This also indicates that the death rate we previously estimated is much lower in reality. Infecting a few more young, healthy people and supervising their health seems a pretty good deal for the world at large.

[0] https://www.livescience.com/covid-antibody-test-results-new-...

Well, I'd love to see that actual study and peer reviews of it. A previous study saying something similar turned out to be done by a hedge fund manager who used it to argue for reopening businesses, and while peer review is still pending, preliminary reviews by other scientist have called it bullshit (only in nicer terms). So you'll excuse my skepticisim here.

Well that settles it, we better wait 30 years before we start testing a vaccine because otherwise it may be dangerous. And then wait 30 years again before releasing it.

Or, you know, test the vaccine the same way we test the flu vaccine every year, which takes a few months, and doesn't require abandoning basic medical ethics.

There are actually steps we can take to speed this up without abandoning medical ethics. It certainly makes sense to have the first human trials be on medical workers, because it has the highest chance of producing benefit for them, and the results will be clearer in populations with a higher infection rate.

But we're not talking about those because you guys would rather talk about injecting people with coronavirus based on a poor understanding of both risk and medical ethics.

It would be curious to see the Vox piece and I do hope someone drops a link in here. It would be most interesting to know if they were comparing it to the initial procedure (surgery + complications) or lifetime experience (Additional risk of death due to the remaining kidney failing).

That said, I feel like your points are a bit overstated. We now have 66 years worth of Kidney transplant data to show it's safe for both parties, but a lot of people needed to participate in what was a new, risk, experimental surgery to get us to this point.

At some point people have to be willing to take a little bit of risk to get data that could save untold lives and relieve unquantifiable suffering.

Additionally, if COVID-19 does indeed have some horrible long term effect, the cost us having less data or less valuable data now will have a much larger consequence than could ever be suffered by these volunteers.

> We now have 66 years worth of Kidney transplant data to show it's safe for both parties, but a lot of people needed to participate in what was a new, risk, experimental surgery to get us to this point.

Uh, technically that's true, but the risks are not the same. The first successful kidney removal (nephrectomy) was in 1869. It wasn't for a donation, it was for a woman suffering an uncloseable fistula which, without the operation, would have killed her. So what exactly was she risking? By the time someone was allowed to volunteer to donate a kidney in 1954, nephrectomy had the better part of a century's worth of data and refinement of technique.

Compare this to the risk you're proposing: With current measures which seem to be working, there's a good chance that most people don't get infected. So you're proposing that healthy individuals who would likely not contract the virus, be intentionally infected with a disease which he only have an approximate mortality rate for, and that we have no idea of the long-term effects of.

Surely you can see how the first risk fits withing "First, do no harm", while the risk you're proposing simply doesn't.

Good points. Only obvious solution is to give to the health care workers and you have your control group.

I'm sure that the Vox article said "from what we know so far", but even if it didn't say that, isn't it obvious? We can only talk from current knowledge.

> but even if it didn't say that, isn't it obvious?

If it's obvious then it should be equally obvious that a comparison with something that has long term knowledge is nonsensical.

1. Part of current knowledge are the facts that a) we don't know the long-term effects, and b) those long-term effects might be horrific.

2. It's apparently not obvious, because people on this thread seem to not have thought of it, and when I pointed it out, they've argued vehemently against it.

I'd happily volunteer to participate.

By the same argument, we also don't know the long term effects of drugs and vaccines that haven't been in use for a very long time

>If scientists infected a bunch of 20 year olds with Covid in 2020 and by 2050, 40% of them die of lung cancer before the age of 50, is that something you'd be cool with?

If the vaccine works then we'll all be dying of lung cancer in 30 years.