When the standard of care is available only to a section of the population, the priority groups at the moment, then it is not standard of care for the rest of the population. Therefore, it is ethical to continue with a placebo in the population outside the priority groups, as long as that non-priority status … Continue reading With two vaccines approved for restricted use, can placebos be used in trials?
Placebos
Ethics of denying COVID-19 vaccine to placebo group participants once EUA is granted
Offering the vaccine right away to those in the placebo group will first require unblinding the study. Unblinding the study and offering the vaccine to the placebo group will make it almost impossible to gather further information on vaccine efficacy, thus making full licensure challenging.
Editorial: Use and misuse of the placebo effect
Published in The Hindu on March 16, 2011 Are placebos inert substances with no real therapeutic effect? Placebos go back to the origins of medicine as a science and as an art and have been part of the stock-in-trade of charlatanism and quackery. Today they are routinely used in human clinical trials for comparing the … Continue reading Editorial: Use and misuse of the placebo effect
Science Chronicle 