Getting in your car has risk, so does riding a bike. They shouldn’t be coin flips.
I just don't think there is any reason to put that additional context into what happened here.
>But nowhere did the form explicitly indicate that any of this could end in death, nor did that come up during any conversations with Qiu or the other doctors, Jason and Linda say.
Wisdom teeth removal under general anesthesia is around 1 in 100,000.
It doesn’t sound so crazy if the risks were presented as “only 10x as risky as wisdom teeth extraction”.
Which also omits the base level mortality of dental complications wisdom teeth are likely to cause.
Nor does the discussion section nor overall summary figure, which is 3 in a million for all forms of anesthesia (local, sedation, and general), where you have to at least exclude local anesthesia (the most common type) as having a fundamentally lower risk of death than sedation or GA.
That's why we need external controls, ethical commites and so on.
I have multiple sclerosis and at the time of my diagnosis the best treatment available to me in terms of slowing the progression of MS had a risk of triggering a rare brain infection that would kill you. So it was a choice between treatments that didn't work as well but had lower risk and treatments with greater odds of being able to walk/work/not be in horrifying constant pain in 10 years but also a small chance of death.
These decisions can end up being horribly complicated, and they are definitely revealing in terms of your values.
They did not set out to kill the child. And the autism wasn't even the biggest issue. The issue is the developmental delays that were expected to compound the more the brain was left untreated.
The far-more common sentiment that I see among anti-vaxxers is that the risk of death from childhood diseases like chicken pox are either zero or close-to-it, and that the risk of receiving autism from the vaccine is at least one-in-ten. These numbers aren't true, of course, but in their minds, they're weighing a negligible-chance of terrible outcome against a moderate chance of bad outcome.
I'm sure there's a few extremists of course, who would say they prefer a dead child to an autistic one (same as how some parents feel about gay kids), but it does not represent most of the people in these movements.