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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   2302 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 29, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I'm not actually asking about an ideal system for handling pandemics. I don't think that's possible.

That's a hell of a thing to drop this far into a conversation about pandemics.

if you were making a system for all pandemics, you'd have to handle Covid, plus Aids, plus Ebola, plus everything else that's come down the pike, plus whatever the next pandemic may be, which none of us can predict.

Do you honestly think there are no differences between conceptual schema or patterns of behavior/regulation that can be applied across different flavors of pandemics? There are no better or worse ways of doing things in advance?

We can get to the rest of your comment in a bit, but we really ought to stop here for a second, because if I'm hearing what I think you're saying, most of the rest of the discussion might be pointless.

I skipped over the "HCT/RCT debate" question because I honestly have no clue what that is. A few google searches didn't provide much insight. What is this debate?

HCT is Human Challenge Trials; RCT is Randomized Controlled Trials. I do kinda sorta think that you might just not be very exposed to any of the debates going on about how to improve our systems for the possibility of new pandemics. I guess I'm not sure why you would be, given that you seem to think that it's pointless to even try. I guess I'd just wonder which came first. Did you decide that it was pointless to try, and thus never went and learned anything about what factors might be considered? Or is it just that you have no idea what factors might be considered, and so you concluded that it must be pointless to try?

I'd say I'm certainly open to hearing ideas and possibilities, but I'd like to hear something more specific than just we should go faster or we should skip trials. Which trials are we skipping, how are we dealing with the effects of skipping those trials? In my view, I've been trying this whole conversation to get out of you exactly what specifically you want to do, ideally something more generally applicable than, we did this specific bad thing during Covid, let's not do that. I mean, yeah, that's technically true, but how do you generalize that beyond, we should put better people in charge?

The mind boggles a bit trying to come up with general principles for addressing pandemics that would apply well to both of, let's say, Covid and Aids. If you can come up with some that don't just reduce down to putting better people in charge, by all means, let me know.

I am aware of what Human Challenge Trials are. Randomized Controlled trials are what we're already doing. I've got no problem with Human Challenge Trials, sounds like a good idea to me. It's at least a specific and actionable proposal. Liability might be a concern, but that ought to be solvable with waviers or some minor legislation. It's a relatively modest modification of current practice. It would likely result in full market availability somewhat sooner, though probably not dramatically so. The number of people accepted into such a trial would likely be modest. Though I gather you seemed interested in much more dramatic changes? Operation Warp Speed as it was actually executed produced far more dramatic timeline reductions just by bureaucratic optimization. Certainly nothing wrong with going even faster yet, but no need to forget what we actually did accomplish.

Another thing I'd note is that medical technology continues to advance incredibly fast. As far as I know, this was the first time in history we had a vaccine candidate ready for trials within weeks of the target viruses genome being isolated. That's freaking amazing! Can we come up with ways to get it verified and out to the public even faster than we actually did? Probably! But let's not beat ourselves up too bad, this stuff is all pretty new.

I'd say I'm certainly open to hearing ideas and possibilities

Great! That brings us back to about:

Let's start with just the basics...

You now seem to have agreed with one of the specific proposals I mentioned (HCTs). How about the rest of the specific basics I mentioned, before we get into yet more specifics?

I think even you could agree that you shouldn't further delay things in order to try to swing an election. Moreover, you shouldn't even threaten mandates in order to justify performing so poorly, much less actually implement them.

These should be pretty easy points of agreement, and it's always good to try to generate some nice easy agreement early on to show mutual positive sentiment and likely compatibility of underlying goals/schemas between interlocutors.

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