Bryan Caplan:
How come no country on Earth tried voluntary paid human experimentation?* As far as I can tell, the most important factor was the formal and informal opposition of bioethicists. In particular, bioethicists converged on absurdly (or impossibly) high standards for “truly informed consent” to deliberate infection
…I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Bioethics is to ethics as astrology is to astronomy. If bioethicists had previously prevented a hundred Tuskegees from happening, COVID would still have turned the existence of their entire profession into a net negative for humanity. Verily, we would be better off if their field had never existed.
[note that we are, finally, starting a human challenge trial, in the UK]