You don’t have to be a doctrinaire libertarian—though it helps—to see the value in letting people with nothing left to lose experiment on themselves. They may get a new lease on life. The rest of us get meaningful information that may speed up the development of the next great medical intervention. The ineptitude of the official response to Ebola, both here and in Africa, drives home the need the change the ways in which we go about developing new medical interventions. As my Reason colleague Ronald Bailey has written, quick diagnostic tests for Ebola had been developed years ago and promising work was proceeding on a vaccine and other methods of disrupting epidemics, but it all floundered in a regulatory environment that doesn’t move very quickly until it’s too late. Indeed, in August, just as the Ebola epidemic was exploding in Africa, the FDA put a hold on a Canadian company’s treatment program. (The FDA has since reversed the hold.)
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 12:01:36 +0000
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