@49, By the 4 percent I explicitly was talking about the general rate of complications. And yes, I've tried to say what 50 has said -- your being far too melodramatic about challenge trials. And, as I've said before, you just go on with your life and let millions die in the name of vaccine perfection. I, on the other hand, will be happy to contribute to vaccine research (as the other 43 million people have done) without risking the lives of over a hundred million people so that we can perfect the vaccine.

The difference between me and you is that I know I'm not qualified, and so when there's more than a 99% consensus of experts who are qualified, I listen to the experts rather than going off and forming my own theories on the topic, working myself up over it, then informing everyone about them as if it's truth.  I also apparently have a much better understanding of probability, because "a thousand people died" has to be taken in context and, if you consider this to be unsafe, you'd better never walk out your front door again.

The UK is doing challenge trials, it's just way too late to matter and they needed to be doing this 4 months ago if not sooner.  But with respect to "it would be horrifying if you were running things", well, go be horrified at the UK government, who apparently thinks what I'm proposing here is reasonable enough that they're doing it: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-56097088

We just gave a whole bunch of people a placebo and then said "in order to prove this vaccine works we'll have to wait until some of you get covid".  This is a challenge trial dressed up nice and taking way longer.  Cut the participants by a tenth or a hundredth and give them Covid and the same number of people get Covid total, same number of deaths etc. but with a shorter timeline.  You always have to make a trade-off of how many people you're willing to let die for the sake of finding the treatment.  The current medical establishment decided that the trade-off here was high double digit thousands of people, for the sake of not actively causing the deaths.  But at the end of the day a death is a death, and it would have been better if we had let a comparatively very small number of consenting, informed, uncoerced volunteers take the risk.  Could have done it with people in amazing health in their 20s and still known at least half of what we needed to know from it with basically no risks at all to the participants, being as by a few months in we did have the knowledge to know who was and wasn't going to die from it.  You can hate challenge trials all you want, and in normal times we maybe shouldn't depending on exactly what it's for, but this is an emergency and at the end of the day giving people a placebo vaccine and then sending them back out into the world to see if they get covid is exactly the same, just with the ability for us all to pat ourselves on the back about it.  We didn't have a choice about needing to do the research, but we did have a choice between "this feels good and lets us pretend we didn't cause a problem but is slow" and "this doesn't feel good but is fast", where either side of that choice is the same net harm from the perspective of the participants but very much not from the perspective of all the people we could have saved.

As for volunteers needing to be experts to know the risks, "This is a challenge trial. Here is what we think will happen.  Worst case is you die horribly" from Dr expert PHD whatever seems pretty clear-cut.  We've taken this whole "protect people from themselves" thing to a ridiculous degree.  You don't have to be the expert to understand the risk of any clinical trial at all because a big part of the clinical trial is they tell you what those are.  SO not really sure how having biology expertise comes into whether or not a volunteer should be allowed to volunteer for a thing?  I mean, there has to be a reasonable belief that you're not going to die from it, etc.  Doctors shouldn't just be murdering people, you should always consider the ethics.  But this kind of thing shouldn't be a hard no in the first place, but especially not if the main argument you have against it is that we should be protecting people from themselves, because that's just treating the world like everyone is an idiot.

As for China and Russia I'm not happy about everything they did, but everyone in the US, UK, etc. has entirely failed to get into emergency pandemic people are dying mode and instead made the trade-off of destroying the economy and entirely taking the ethical high ground at the cost of everything else.  We aren't really more defensible than them.  For example, we could have done things like said "it's an emergency. You can get the vaccine before Phase III but you have to pay for it yourself and sign this you might die waiver" but we didn't.  It's not more ethically defensible to be the guy who stands back and does nothing.  They took a stance that I don't like and which is very much at odds with western values that I do support, but it's a pandemic.  There's a place and time for ethical high grounds.  Majorly bad emergency situation is not that time.  Being as this is apparently devolving into you straw-man everything I say, I'm not saying we should throw out our ethics for it or anything like that.  But we should have recognized the complexity and treated it like a complex situation.  Instead, it's "U.S. good at pandemic, China bad at pandemic, also we must observe our magical this is ethical medicine protocols almost to the letter".

The result of us mishandling it is we have multiple strains.  Multiple strains is really bad potentially.  See also the 1918 Spanish flu.  No one needs a biology anything to understand the thing in the history books about the last time something this major got out of control in this way.  It can't get as bad as that because we have much better medical science--but yeah, yeah, it can get a lot worse and it's possible we haven't dodged that bullet at all.

If we had stopped putting our heads up our asses and made vaccines happen 6 months ago that wouldn't even really be a conversation point at all, instead it's "maybe we have to do all these vaccines again, oops".  At some point you do have to have a threshold for when it's fine to start talking about breaking medical ethics standards that aren't that thought out in the first place.  Is it 1000 deaths per volunteer you could have risked but didn't?  10000?  How sure are you that that virus mutation clock wasn't ticking?  No one honestly knows if that clock ran out or not at this point, but we have certainly cut it very, very close to the "and then it got way worse and welcome to Covid the sequel" line.

Like, I get it.  It's nice and comfortable to think that do no harm is the be-all and end-all of medical ethics.  You can just blame the illness for causing all the deaths.  The deaths are never on you.  A guideline like that prevents some horrible stuff, sure.  But it does that at the cost of ever allowing us to respond when it's important.  And yeah, we didn't *cause* the deaths.  But if you see someone's house is on fire and it might burn down the block and all you can do is piss on it, you're still going to put the fire out because it's a giant fucking fire and it needs to be put out before the entire city is in ruins.

Also, please learn to spell vaccine.  I have to say that it's really hard for me to take FUD argument rants about a topic seriously when you can't even spell the thing you're arguing about.

@52
Yeah, I guess I'm double posting.  You're using a study which was predicated around lying to the participants at the counterexample to what I'm saying.  I have not once in this thread said "let's lie to the participants" or "let's not treat the participants" or anything like that at all.

Seriously, stop straw manning my posts.

@54, 55 and 56, very well said. I've been saying that repeatedly in the like the last 20 posts but Ghost just wants to keep spreading his FUD even though he isn't qualified to do so. Not to mention he happily distorts the reality of the situation.
Like I said before, Ghost, if these were normal times and not an emergency, I'd definitely be all for "Let the medical testing procedures take their course". But as I said before... This. Is. A. Pandemic. And when your in a pandemic, you have to dispense with the normal procedures because they simply aren't going to help you. Even if Trump hadn't disbanded the pandemic response office, even the office would've done the same thing -- they would've never utilized the existing medical testing infrastructure because 8-10 years is far, far too long for something like Covid-19. This is a pandemic. We need to get as many people vaccinated as fast as possible and as safely as possible without resulting in a ridiculous amount of new cases, no questions asked. We can't wait three years. We can't wait five and we certainly can't wait ten.

Ghost, I see what you're driving at, with at least a few of your points. I don't agree, but I'm not here to demonize you.

A few rebuttals though.

You say that humans have more potential than rats.
I guess this is subjective. If you mean that humans have more potential to advance human interests, then sure. But if you mean that humans are doing more for the world at large, think again. The earth would be far, far better off without us here. Stop and really think about that for a second.
Also, you're dealing with leaky ethics again. Rats have families, personalities and complex social structures. Why is it okay to snuff them out - to raise them from birth fully with the intention of killing them - but it's not okay to even speed up medical trials in a pandemic? I think you've got a bit to think about. Do me a favour though; please don't answer me this question, but rather answer it for yourself.

You say that we have to pay people to do clinical trials.
Why? Where is it written in any hard science that financial compensation must be provided for a potentially life-altering risk? I am not saying we flat-out -can't pay people, but that's coercion, and gets into more shaky ethics.
In addition, the fact that submitting yourself to a Covid-19 trial might affect your offspring? Welcome to 2021, stay awhile. Most big choices you make will have an impact on that, including the choice to have children in the first place. The trick here would be to make absolutely certain that we have told participants as much as we possibly can about the risks, side effects and complications. Truth is, you never know 100% of what you think you do, so you're always taking risks to some degree. That's life. But we would need to remove all reasonable doubt if we wanted to do these challenge trials. No one's going to force anyone to engage in them if they don't want to - that's just nasty - but for those who want to? I say let them try, provided all those safeguards I mentioned are in place.

You say we should have done better with medical research and the allocation of funds.
Yup, agreed. But we didn't. Wish in one hand, spit in the other; see which one fills up first. It would have been lovely if we hadn't been idiots about this. We were, and now we're reaping the whirlwind. Hopefully this puts our future medical decisions into some sort of perspective. Our whole pharmaceutical industry - worldwide, even - is pretty bloated and broken, and it needs serious overhaul. In fact, a ton of things need serious overhaul. But that's not a good argument as to why we shouldn't use the tools we have at our disposal right now to help people be safer. There is no scenario that has us risking zero human lives to perform accurate human trials; that just can't happen under these circumstances. I suggest your make your peace with that reality.

So, short answer.
Q: If I don't have any related complications, which vaccine should I take, Fizer or Oxford?
A: Yes.

@62, I... I seriously want to know what your smoking, man. Camlorn and petty do not go in the same sentence. Sorry, man, but its you who's being petty because you keep invalidating your own point by bringing up things that you've already been majorly criticized for. That doesn't help you in the slightest.
Alas, I'm done debating this topic with you, Ghost. Have fun acting like a know-it-all.

63, enjoy thinking you're the king of the world because you know some code. Except remember thatv doesn't make you all knowing and give you the ability to look down on  others.

you just proove my point. You have such an insane inflated sense of self worth. That code example just prooves that, and the fact that you withhout knowing anything about any of my works, presume to see yourself above me. Any objective person  reading this would see it too. But for your information, I have an advanced degree,  and any page of my thesis would equal several thousand of your lines of code in its worth, creativity, and actual work  to be able to write the page. Don't know why, but this seems to be a trend with computer science people. Alot  of them I've I've encountered, have this incredible know it all attitude and ego.

@Ethin, sent you a PM.
Gotta go off topic, no choice left...
@Ghost, this is not good, others haven't said about you that you don't know this, you just know that and that's not enough, and you are saying to Camlorn and Ethin, you don't know this, you don't know that, then why are you doing that.
It's just a discussion, and everyone is free to discuss.

Coding is not a simple thing, you know? It takes a lot of time, effort, and money sometimes to learn.
And hey. Camlorn just told you to correct the spelling of vaccine, what's wrong in that. And you're taunting him that he should do some other productive work? Look in the Developers Room, he has done enough productive work. He might have done it just for your good, so that others don't tell you that you've got poor spelling skills.
I was just looking at Reddit one day, and people are like, disability is the reason that your spellings are wrong. It was Cosmic Rage page I was looking at. And the Original Poster was, Lara Stardust.
By the way, if we will not read your post slowly, how will we understand what's there in that wall of text. If we just scroll through it, people are like, hey you don't read full post, so you shouldn't be discussing X Y Z topic, and that will contribute to drama topics.
Edit: standing by with post 66 and 68.

Okay, this is the moment where I wave my hands and ask that we dial it back. I'm not asking for you to stop talking, but maybe scale things down a little. I'm not even doing so with my admin face on, but I will if I have to. And no, this isn't targeted.
Ethin, I think you're getting really hot about this in a way you sometimes do. Just cool it. I happen to agree with you, but you're not in the best position.
Ghost, please stop using the worst of a situation to represent the entire situation.

Re: sentience:
Generally, sentience is self-awareness. A rat may not know what it's seeing if you show it a mirror, but it knows it has to eat, has to keep its family safe. It's trying to survive just like you and I. If you pick up a rat and shake it, it'll try to bite you. If you slice its leg open, it will squeal in pain and then probably lick its wound. A rat is aware of its surroundings to a great enough degree that your argument about sentience falls on its face.
You mention the people I have pushed to make big decisions. What about the literally millions of insects I have forced to abandon wherever it was they'd landed (say, to get food) while I walk through long grass? Never mind the thousands I've killed over the years, for no other reason than that they land on me and annoy me. Now, this is slippery-slope territory, and I recognize it, but I want you to think really, really big picture here for a sec.
Take humans out of the equation. There is no other species currently alive that is affecting the earth nearly as much as humans. If you just deleted all humans, and all sign of human presence, tomorrow, that'd obviously suck for human progress, but for the planet itself, it would be an enormous net improvement. Taken in that light, any efforts we make to try and prolong human life or spread ourselves out further are purely selfish, and are probably going to result in us destroying our home eventually. No other species destroys its home in quite this way.
What was that you were saying about sentience? We are not even self-aware enough to realize what we're doing. That, or we're too monstrous to stop. Please don't talk about ethics anymore. You are wavering wildly from position to position, and clearly have only an armchair sociologist's understanding, which is not up to the task of defending yourself on multiple fronts like this.

I'm done here, unless I have to moderate.

69,  I recommend you use some translator app to better understand posts here. As for spelling, it is universally known as pettyness if you are arguing a point with someone, and instead of  addressing your points, that person takes shots  at your spelling to make them seem superior.  Coding may be hard, that doesn't mean  we get to worship people who master it. And mastering a field of knowledge, then producing an original work in that field is much harder.
re. , sentience
Jayde, sentience is independant from any damage we cause to this planet. Having family, or biting someone doesn't equal sentience., you are sentient because we can have this debate, sentience means you are capable of complex learning, understanding obscure concepts and complex learning beyond simple behavioral modifications. A sentient creature has more of  an impact with other sentient creatures, and more potential.  This is what I mean, with regards to experimentation, I'd rather run my experiments on unthinking non-sentient  creatures than intelligent humans.