While I understand all of that, value the great contributions which have been brought with extreme work hours spent, from my life experience and given the current situation I can't agree with that outcome. I'm now leading a company and that needs to make decisions based on not fully known ground at some times. Back in the early 80s - being a very peaceful person - I went to the army in Germany, became a reserve officer after my experience what the warsaw treaty focused government in eastern Germany aimed at. In such situations you are forced to make decisions not based on long research and with confidence close to 100%, but sometimes at very low confidence levels. However not making a decision could cost more lives than making an only half-way founded decision.
And mankind is in a similar situation now: Worldwide we have about 12000 individuals dying every day, that's about 350 thousand deaths in the month, probably a million more before vaccinations achieve sufficient effect. We have population groups with a risk of death > 20% at the moment they get ill, maybe >50% from the moment the infection gets serious. Unfortunately I'm observing that rather close now. Concluding from the published statistics in the home for older people in the neighbor village from about 100 inhabitants 14 died between December 30 and January 4th. Not much difference in a similar institution in the region right before Christmas.
In that situation - once there is a potentially potent treatment - not making that substance available to people can not be justified. If I have a chance of dying with 50% probability anyhow and if I could take some substance that might help me and has a probability of killing me with less than 10% probability, then I should have that substance available. The risk from what I might die should be my decision and not depend on a two years standard clinical test period. I don't care about pre-clinical and clinical tests if I'm likely to die before those tests are completed. Of course products can always be improved, but in the current situation the question is not what is the best drug, but whether people can get a good-enough drug or not. Being somewhat sarcastic: If somebody is beyond 80 and gets ill with COVID-19, questions about possible negative effects on fertility or damage to the unborn child in pregnancy are not the main concern.
That argument of course is valid only in emergency treatment for persons that are seriously ill. The situation with vaccines is very different: They are given to healthy persons with a risk of dying from COVID-19 lower than 0.1% as of so far accumulated statistics, so there risks from side effects of the vaccination obviously are to be considered and limited with high confidence. But when I'm infected and likely to die from COVID-19 anyhow, I don't care so much about side effects of the preparate on my liver, as long as they're not likely to kill me faster than COVID-19.
That point of view seems to be missing in the discussion considering possible current runways. As soon as there is some confidence that COVID Moonshot results might save lives, there is no justification to deny these results (in form of chemicals a person could take, not paperwork) to persons ill with that disease. This most likely does not fit into standard drug production and distribution schemes. But then on one hand a lot of psychedelic drugs are produced and distributed with much less ethic justification. And on the other hand such situation should justify official, legal procedures beyond lengthy standard therapeutic certification processes. With that in mind, Project Moonshot should consider a minimum set of tests as quick as possible to make sure what has been developed so far is more likely to save the life of somebody in a high-risk group and ill with COVID-19 than take it. That should happen beside further attempts to improve the results and go through lengthy tests.
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