alt Hacker NewsBecause it's generally unethical to not give someone a treatment known already to be safe and effective. Studies of new vaccines where there is not an existing vaccine _do_ use placebo controls. Heck, my son got placebo during moderna's pediatric covid vaccine trial (to our frustration. grin.)
Subsequent trials generally compare against the best known current treatment as the control instead.
This study has no such concerns. It's ethical to include images of non-cancerous breast tissue. The things are not comparable.
Replies
onetokeoverthe • last Thursday at 12:22 PM
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The covid vaccines were a whole different beast, though interesting case studies they were done under emergency authorization and didn't follow standard protocols.
Vaccine studies today almost always use a previously approved vaccine as the "control" group. That isn't a true control and if you walk back the chain of approvals you'd be hard pressed to find a starting point that did use proper control groups.
Anyway, my point here wasn't to directly debate vaccines themselves, only to point out that its interest to me as someone without a career in health to see the same effective argument used in two different scenarios with drastically different common responses.