This video is absolutely stunning in its brazenness. If this fellow is what the academy is producing, then it would seem that the whole job of the bioethicist is to invent new excuses that politicians and bureaucrats can use to expand the harm they do, without pricking their own consciences.
Note the magician’s sleight-of-hand trick he’s playing, here. His opening gambit is “making risks tolerable”. So, of course, everyone goes chasing off after “tolerable”. But in actual fact, there is no “risk”, here. Risk implies a probability of harm in some action. But infecting everyone means it’s not a risk at all: It’s a certainty. These human beings who ‘volunteer’ to be infected will be harmed. Whether or not they die from the infection is beside the point. Infecting people IS harming them.
He then compares intentionally infecting people with a virus, to donating a kidney (again, only for the purpose of relative risk comparison). But this is insane. This is like saying that golf and American football are exactly the same, because they’re both “sports”.
He then launches into a rationalization for picking one person out of twelve-thousand, whom they should be allowed to kill, in the name not of finding a vaccine, but only in the hope of finding it sooner. Sooner than what? This is an unfalsifiable counter-factual.
Also, this is the classic medical version of the trolley problem. In the hypothetical situation, 12 people could be restored to full health, if the surgeon kills one person to harvest his organs for the other 12. But in this case, 1 person is killed, and there’s no guarantee that anyone will be saved in the process.
He then reiterates the kidney argument. Only this time, makes the mistake even more obvious. The kidney donor – as he rightly points out - is making a fully informed consensual choice, and his choice WILL benefit one other person, a person that the donor values . But in the case of intentional infection, he openly admits, there is only a “potential” to help others somewhere else. The benefit is only probable, and highly abstract. In other words, this option is really about satisfying researcher preferences, not actually doing good medicine.
All of this in six minutes. It’s appalling to me, how far up their own asses these academics have crawled. The Q&A after the speech is almost entirely dedicated to relative mathematical probability calculations comparing infection and vaccine discovery. It’s like we’ve handed our entire civilization over to a gaggle of autistic sociopaths.
[Imported from exitingthecave.com on 28 November 2021]