No, because they’re worse off in this study than they would be without the study. Without the study: Their easily treatable infection is treated via normal procedures. With the study: The adopt the sub-standard practice of letting the patients treat the infections themselves.
So clearly the study has made them worse off than they would have been.
In this case: Without the study: The control villages wear masks or not as they wish. With the study: The control villages wear masks or not as they wish. They are given no materials or encouragement to do anything differently than they would have.
You’re only thinking it’s unethical, because you’re assuming the conclusion.
This case is different from your “easily treatable bacterial infection” example.
If you want to go down the unethical road, you are going to have to give us the state of existing knowledge on education and masking efficacy against COVID spread in a Bangladeshi village setting prior to the study being conducted. If that evidence of effectiveness was as clear cut as your “easily treatable bacterial infecton” example implies, then I’d favor that it was unethical. If the evidence was more equivocal, then the study becomes more ethical.
Dont they sometimes stop placebo trials early because the results shows its working and it would therefore be unethical to keep giving the placebo not the real thing?
The treatment is randomly assigned at the village level, where some villages experience an increase in aggregate mask usage, while other villages do not. It does not have to be a comparison of 100% masking to 0% masking to be an assessment of mask effectiveness.
The goal is to assess the effectiveness of nordic hamstring exercise on injury prevention. You have two groups of randomly-assigned soccer players, one that is encouraged to perform regular exercises over a 13-week period, the other of which is not.
They track the soccer players and assess injury rates for each group. That’s an RCT, even though they are not telling the control group not to stretch. The RCT is imposing a random difference across the two groups, and it’s that randomly-assigned difference that allows the researcher to assess the effectiveness of the treatment. Same thing with the masks.
Of course they do that. But they do that because they obtain strong evidence that the real thing is better than placebo.
So for your thesis to be analogous, there would have to have been strong evidence prior to the study that the interventions would make a significant difference to Bangladeshi villagers. Do you have that?
They really cut corners on those down to the minimum. I’m honestly a bit uncomfortable with people agitating to speed up the timelines for full approval and use for children.
I was being somewhat flippant, but your statement was still incorrect.
It is true that the consideration you pointed out is important when making ethical judgements. However, there are considerations that can trump that.
Here’s another example. Terminal cancer patient. Has tried all existing therapies. Nothing works and he will be dead in under 3 months most likely. Someone just invents a new drug that could theoretically cure him and has good reason to believe that. But they just developed it, so there is no long term safety and data.
All of this is explained to the patient, who says he wants to try the drug. Are we really going to say that it’s unethical because there are no “studies of long-term effectiveness and harm”?
I guess the devil is in the detail as to what “strong evidence” is. The givewell review talks about evidence that masks works, and that was back in 2020.
It’s massively +EV for the country if he has a really nasty case and ends up posting a video from a hospital bed where he says “yeah, I should have gotten the vaccine”, right?
I don’t listen to Rogan at all, so this is probably a stupid question, but how sure are we that he didn’t get vaxxed surreptitiously, but just spews the anti-vax shit to get paid.
I listened to his podcast up until some point last year and he has said that he would get the vaccine once it became available, but it looks like he didn’t follow through on that.
Reports were that he sold the podcast to Spotify for $100,000,000, so that theory seems unlikely.
To close out our little guessing game, as of September 1 the U.S. stands at 61.9% of population with at least one does, and 52.6% fully vaccinated according to CDC.