I have a different perspective. In a drug trial you have to prove that a new drug is safe before handing it out to a bigger number of people. The default case (if you don't test the drug) is that nobody gets it.

In this case, it is different. People will put pressure on the government to allow concerts again rather sooner than later and the default case is probably that there will be concerts again before the Corona situation is over. If you don't do the test, you have to make the decision whether / when to allow concerts again blindly.

So basically you have the situation where people will take the new drug anyway and you have the choice whether you want to test its safeness before they do.

If you do the test and it turns out to be unsafe, at least you have good arguments when you need to make the decision.

I never thought that the ethics of medical research could risk falling prey to the same traps of reasoning that cause short-sighted decisions in business - namely that easily measurable short-term concerns trump greater but less measurable long-term concerns.

But this is probably known to people who are in the field. You have to defend your decisions the same way you would in business or investing, but instead of people shorting your stock, you will have people trying to cut your funding, accuse you of causing harm and ultimately trying to destroy your reputation/career.

It’s fascinating how this trap of group fallacy has the potential to affect different fields, like there’s some universality to the human behavior behind it.

The "Corona situation" isn't going to be "over" in our lifetime. The first polio vaccine was developed in the 1950s, but the most recent had polio epidemic was this past September, almost a year ago. Taking a more nuanced view, it's already "over" for many people in lots of countries - offices, restaurants, hair salons, and bars are open. Places where people aren't wearing masks because they don't need to, and no one's getting COVID-19.

In a sane world, the government's reopening plans aren't dictated by the local restaurant owners, but rather by health organizations run by scientists. In such a world, concerts won't happen again before it is actually safe to do so. Surprisingly, there are some places in the world where that is actually the case!

The question though, isn't if a particular drug is safe or not. That's a very important question to answer, and one of the hurdles to pass, but in this context, the ethics are around exposing people to a potentially fatal disease, without actually knowing if the vaccine being tested successfully protects against the disease. If we inject people with a vaccine, and then with large amounts of the SARS-Cov-2 virus, and they develop COVID-19, then we can say that the vaccine being tested on them didn't work in that case. Unfortunately we directly injected them with a potentially lethal disease, possibly resulting in a life-long disability.

It's that last step that most hospital ethics boards aren't willing to take.

From what I heard on the news this study is trying to figure out movement patterns in differently dense crowds. They have 3 levels of crowdedness.

The point is not to study or provoke infections. Everyone must wear medical grade masks (forgot the actual name).

There are still ethical considerations here but I don't think it is as severe as it may sound from your post.

Even the linked BBC article will tell you as much, including that every participant was tested for Covid 19. I have seen/used such temporal contact network datasets, they are very important to understand the micro-dynamics of disease spreading.

This study was not about observing infections or exposing people, it was about movement and interaction patterns. Every single participant was tested before the event, and only those with negative results were allowed to participate. Of course it's not risk free, but it seems to be highly unlikely that anyone of the volunteers will be harmed (especially since they are all younger than 50).

And they were required to wear FFP3 (N95) masks.

I thing you had a typo and wanted to write "FFP2 (N95)" mask (which had been used in that study, at least in the sources I have read).

FFP3 is N99. It's better than N95.

AFAIK, they gave FFP2 masks, which are like N95.

FFP3 masks are usually not preferred for Covid-19 because they supposedly don't offer that much more protection and they are less comfortable. Because of their greater airflow restriction, they are often fitted with valves, that makes them much less effective at protecting others.

FFP3/N99 respirators are mostly used in industrial settings to protect against very fine particles like asbestos dust.

There had been a small study recently that indicates that N95 masks with valve are likely worse then normal surgical masks (and even some self made ones). While fitted N95 make are already "excellent" wrt. Protecting others.

Only gotcha it's that the study was about introducing a simpler affordable way to measure the effectiveness of masks wrt. protecting others and get feeback for that method, so the number of tests they did are to small to be anything then an indicator for what might maybe be the result in a large study using that method.

So this may be stupid but could you like tape some cloth over the valve to catch the droplets?

Actually that might work.

Through it should be noted that the valved mask where still reasonable good.

Actually even a bandanna reduced the amount of water droplets in the air by nearly 50% (if I remember correctly) or at least the one they tested did so.

But fleece turned out to be terrible as it spliced the droplets into many smaller ones without hindering them much increasing the total amount of droplets in the air.

Thinks like that are why I thing we should have a larger study with that method or similar methods.

Because we don't know if all fleece masks are as bad or even worse then no mask or if it was just that fleece mask and if therefore we need to count fleece based home made masks as wearing no mask.

(This also would mainly affect people using fleece based scarfs as both scarf and mask as well as people having a fleece based cycler mask and using it as a protection mask too)

> Considering Germany inspired so much of modern medical ethics work, it’s ironic to see them conduct such a study.

Please read the article before commenting and making strong accusations.

In fact, they created an ultra-safe environment where the chance of getting infected would be close to zero.

We're not very consistent with this though. We consider it perfectly acceptable to put people in harms way as part of the armed forces. Even though the exact same demographic effects are in play.

> We consider it perfectly acceptable

I doubt people on an ethics board for medical studies would find that perfectly acceptable.

And I agree, but isn't that a strong indictment of medical ethics? If medical ethicists would rather let a fire burn out of control than risk the lives of firefighters to put it out, they're not optimizing for the right thing.

I don't see why it is a strong indictment of any sort of ethics. Waging war is wrong, and saying that it's perfectly acceptable to do so is entirely missing the point.

Firefighters are a separate issue altogether, because the subject being discussed is a lot more ambiguous than firefighting (where the problem is clear, and the consequence for sending a firefighter is a positive result).

The armed forces aren’t a randomized trial.

Many people go into harms way because of a necessary duty (firefighters, etc).

The restrictions on medical trials is because of the power imbalance. If I take a job as a firefighter or soldier that’s different from me living my life and being enrolled in some study putting me at risk for harm.

I don't see how volunteering to enroll in a study (and being compensated for it) is any different to choosing to take a job as a soldier or firefighter.

Taking a job as a soldier is not at all comparable to taking a job as a fire fighter.

Both are expected to expose themselves to risk, both get paid. The many differences seem irrelevant to the topic at hand. What am I missing?

Soldiers tend to kill people, firefighters tend to save people, the difference - to me - would seem to be obvious.

That difference still seems to me not relevant to the topic at hand.

A printer creates documents and a paper shredder destroys them. Therefore, we can't compare the amount of power they draw from an AC outlet.

Soldiers and firefighters also certainly skew less wealthy/educated/powerful, so a priori I'd say the same power dynamics apply there (though it's of course possible that the effect is smaller if you dig into the numbers).

It's also entirely possible that some people would feel driven to participate in a medical study out of a sense of duty (e.g. I'm young and healthy and want to put myself at a bit of risk to contribute to our understanding of the virus so that my much more vulnerable (grand)parents have a better chance).

Dangling significant financial incentives to the poor or otherwise disadvantaged is one of their big tricks, too.

They test people's behavior not the spread of the virus any participant is tested beforehand (and won't participate if infected) which makes it it likely less dangerous then the daily public transport commute many have to do.

It’s unethical to -certainly- cause harm.

This is such a banal thing to say. By that logic existing in the contemporary world is unethical. At that point who cares about ethics? Ethics to me is fundamentally about improving life not some nonsense sophist rhetoric.

> It’s unethical to -certainly- cause harm.

A much better standard is to claim that "it's unethical to cause harm in order to study the harm done".

We don't expose people to radiation in order to study radiation poisoning, not even in order to research treatment.

We do however accept that some people might be exposed to radiation as part of their jobs or for medical treatments, and the harm caused by this exposure can be studied.

Is your better standard much better? It is unethical to cause harm in order to study the harm done but it is not unethical to cause harm in order to study something that is not the harm done? If not why even make the distinction to begin with?

I think the parent's example is pretty clear. If there were two medical treatments available, both had similar help/harm trade offs, but one caused harm that was "more useful for science", this should not be a factor in the recommendation given by the health care professional.

Life improves all on its own if you leave it alone. By the time ethics and morals are the center of attention, the way has already been lost. Ethics are a product of wrongthink, a capitalist packaging of systemic poison originating from the narrative that your so-called "freedom" is up for sale. Ethics thereby become the means by which to subjugate people and their power of thought, i.e. you and your mind, as a CUSTOM(export) in of itself. The poison is the belief of the promise of the ethic, the promise of the character, or the ethos disregarding the logos and the pathos, which is utilized to persuade large swaths of people and encourages the formation of public and counterpublics which creates a positive feedback loop especially with the structures of "safe spaces" or echo chambers with which to amplify the psuedo-appearance of a prolific environment by which many material goods become available (t-shirts, mugs, stickers, swag, books, etc. -- whatever is the "fashion" of era) in return for a parasitic-like colonization in the minds of human beings, but really it's more akin to the Ouroboros, an "Ethical Ouroboros".

Of course, to break the cycle, the dragon must spit out the Tail it is devouring, realize the tale being fed was simply a grand story of much harm and suffering, shadows on the cave walls of a fever dream, abandon the attitudes of self-annihilation, and move beyond the realm of the known into the fearsome great unknown where ethics has yet to be blown into a giant red balloon full of helium gas known as Penny-wise.

> We developed ethics around clinical research.

Looks like we need to develop some ethics around economic experimentation. The harm caused by lockdowns is going to absolutely dwarf any harm which may have been caused by live research of the virus, and perhaps even worse than if we just let the virus infect everyone until a herd immunity develops.

Herd immunity, in the United States, anyway, absent a vaccine, means between 5 and 8 million people dead.

If 8 million dead doesn’t move you, consider that it would take most of a decade.

Estimates at present of duration of post-infection immunity are less than six months, so it’s also possible that even after millions dead, herd immunity would never be reached.

Update: reinfection is now confirmed as possible in less than one year.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/08/first-confirmed-case...

My understanding is that was a different strain, so it's a doubling of time, not an approach to infinity.

So we’ve never done a lockdown before. We sort of knew there would be harms based on decades of research we’ve done on substance abuse, domestic violence, cancer, heart disease, etc. But there we go, running the worlds largest experiment on social distancing to try and find out which measures work or not. Except we didn’t even get good controls for it. Germany is doing that now apparently.

edit: how many papers are out there trying to quantify all of these measures? There's dozens of published papers and hundreds of pre-prints. How can we view this as anything but an experiment!?