And yet there is a part of me that wonders how much faster progress would be if today’s pharmacists and doctors would be allows to experiment aggressively, like cancer treatment regimes in the 50s-80s.
To be clear, I think what you described is nuts and the current guardrails are here for a reason, but it’s still an interesting question. And perhaps progress wouldn’t be that much faster.
Incidents like these decrease confidence in the medical establishment, which only has a net-negative effect.
Look at the rise of the Anti-Vax movement for example. While a lot of it is disinfo driven, a lot of it is because of distrust of Medicine due to bad past experiences.
For example, low elderly vaccination rates in China during Covid among those who lived during the Cultural Revolution due to latent distrust [0], low polio vaccination rates plus attacks on public healthworkers in Khyber Pakhtunkwa in Pakistan because US and Pakistani intelligence posed as vaccination workers to get Bin Laden's children's DNA confirmation leading to mistrust of vaccine workers [1], and the various tidbits of modern vaccine disinfo today in the west leveraging past examples like Tuskegee Experiments.
Medicine has progressed a lot, but choosing to go fast and break things clearly has a tangible impact on trust of medicine as a whole.
There's no point innovating if most people won't use it or distrust it.
> While a lot of it is disinfo driven, a lot of it is because of distrust of Medicine due to bad past experiences.
I know people who believe the covid vaccines are racist experiments in line with the Tuskegee syphilis study. And that is just the tip of the insanity iceberg they believe in.
To be clear, I think what you described is nuts and the current guardrails are here for a reason, but it’s still an interesting question. And perhaps progress wouldn’t be that much faster.