>> The purposeful exposure, then, in that scenario is to covid, not hydroxychorolquine. To prove that the drug prevents infection by covid you'd not only have to give the drug to the experimental group and then you'd have to give all the trial participants, both groups, a dose of potentially damaging/deadly covid.
Please correct me if I am misunderstanding your concern:
You are considering the possibility of an ethical issue if it turns out the group who receive the treatment progress better than the control group, or vice-versa, and as a result, it is necessary to stop the trial and offer the treatment to both groups (or to withhold treatment from both groups). These are fairly standard provisions in many kinds of RCTs so I presume they would be handled in the same way.
The French study, for example, was ended because it was found that you could not ethically withhold the treatment from the control group given the performance of the treatment group. This would apparently be a "Win" for those wanting the drug cocktail to be supported by the study, but some did try to discredit it on the basis the trial was stopped prematurely.
These things happen with some frequency and there are alternative experimental designs that can address the problem in another way. In the original Zelenko study he conducted by himself, it was simply a group of n participants, all symptomatic, who were put on the drug and all but one lived. That is enough to capture interest but it isn't a controlled study.
Lack of a controlled study (which sometimes is not possible at all) cannot inhibit scientific progress. It can be resolved in a number of ways, commonly, increased sample size. I do not know what the new Zelenko study will look like because we haven't seen it. |
