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If you're going to argue for "an entirely non-profit driven society" go for it.
No, thats not what I was doing: hence my explanation that I understood that you would not accept that as a premise for debate, and my moderation to your premise that profit-driven society is desirable. After that my argument accepts this premise. You seem to have dismissed this further argument through some pre-concieved prejudice - in which case, good luck in engaging in any kind of intelligent debate in the future.
Don't change your principles on my account - let's hear about the non-profit driven society.
The time would be wasted on one as closed minded as yourself, and I'm sure anybody else who might have been interested in the political aspects of this debate (rather than the purely ideological) have lost all interest after your evasions. Stick to your bumper-sticker attitude to life in future, it suits you.
:wave:
On one hand these guinea pigs are poor, naive, innocent and exploited. On the other hand they're university undergrads, who are supposed to be the country's finest brains. Which is it?
Whilst I love the sentiment of a not-for-profit society, weren't these people doing this for profit? £2000 for sitting on your arse for a week is how they saw it, money for nothing, and one or two of the men on Panorama said as much. Your argument, therefore, is not about profit at all, otherwise the guinea pigs wouldn't get paid at all for their time. Your argument is about how someone else dares to make more money on top of that. And that's bollocks.
Point is, they took the carrot that was offered, and its a bit rich to turn around afterwards and say that its all the fault of the big bad nasty pharmaco. They went into the arrangement freely, and anyone with half a brain should know that injecting yourself with developmental drugs carries an inherent risk.
What may or may not be happening in the Third World is an entirely separate debate. Point is, these testers are university educated young men, and its a bit sad to see the country's finest minds turn around and say they didn't realise that being paid handsomely to test developmental drugs might have a risk attached.
Drug companies are on the whole immensely rich and profitable. Please don't try to paint a scene of poor, suffering companies sacrificing decades of research at a cost of billions for pitiful returns. They make a mint out of it. Literally.
Were the tests on animals conducted correctly? Were the quantities used for testing correct or excessive?
Unless they were experimenting with never-before-discovered agents, you can predict events to a degree. Someone should have spotted some point along the line that what they were about to inject to the subjects was as compatible with human bodies crude oil mixed with rat's vomit.
So we agree that drug companies are extremely rich and that they could afford 100s of times bigger compensation than 10k without much adversity then?
the tests up to it were done appropiately, however this kind of treatment is still very new and has an underlying risk of seriously harming the person, that part wasn't mentioned thats why imo they didnt get enough compensation as losing fingers/toes (due to your body acitivating the mechanism when you are cold and trying to conserve body heat) etc
No, yes and yes.
But not all of them are.
Should compensation be decided by turnover or by negligence?
bit of both really, too small amounts of compensation wont warn the company/person to not do it again if their raking it in, but it should still scale with the level of negligance also
Well I can only imagine that a a multimillion Pound company deciding on 10k compensation for a handful of chaps who will have to spend up to a year in hospital/have lost their fingers or toes/will be affected for life (delete as appropriate) are being a bunch heartless ultra greedy cunts, yes.
If these cases happened very often I could see how paying a lot of compensation could have a negative repercussion on the company. But such cases are extraordinarily rare. That is why given the victims a decent compensation is not going to bankrupt or eat into the precious profits of anyone.
I'd like to think the experiments were properly carried out and that the drug companies took their duty of care for the participants seriously. But then I'm a closet idealist.
But not do what again? Test something which may cause an unprecedented and unjpredictable response?
Testing has risk. You sign up to test, you sign up to that risk.