As you already know, I oppose this idea. My reason, however, is not because of any personal adherence to medical ethics – I'm not a physician – and I never took the Hippocratic Oath.
It would be wrong to abandon the high standards of clinical trial-based evidence that the US FDA requires. If we do it now because of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic emergency, we will regret it in the future. These high standards have been the result of hard lessons learned in the past when those standards were lower, or did not yet exist. I can think of two examples:
Thalidomide and the
Polio Vaccine.
Thalidomide led to a major change in law in both the USA and the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal#Change_in_drug_regulations
Fortunately, the Polio Vaccine story seems to have ended well. Although the SV40 tumor virus contamination created a real scare, enough time has passed to realize it was probably harmless. In fact, few people outside of biomedical science even know about it.
Both episodes resulted in a genuine tightening of laws and regulations for testing drugs. They led to a carefully worked out and more rigorous system of testing for safety and efficacy for new drugs that remain as the gold standard.
In more recent times, I can remember when Interferon was said to be a magic bullet against cancer. It was the first gene product to be manufactured by recombinant DNA methods and was revolutionary for the drug industry in the 1990s. It was widely tested against a number of cancer types, and was reported to have significant positive effects against colon cancer. I recall at least six clinical trials reporting that. Unfortunately, these trials were the small Phase 2 trials. There were not enough patients to allow genuinely significant results, and many of them did not include a control arm where similar colon cancer patients were tested with standard therapy only.
Years later, three very large Phase 3 trials were completed, in North America (USA plus Canada), Asia, and Europe (all the EU plus the UK). All of them produced negative results – Interferon was not effective against colon cancer, and it was significantly toxic when given at the high doses used in the trials. Before those results were available, many oncologist were clamoring for early approval of Interferon. After it was found to be ineffective, the overwhelming opinion among oncologists was that they were glad Interferon was not given an early approval. In fact, the whole Interferon episode was said to be a good example why we must do those large and time consuming Phase 3 clinical trials.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interferon#Interferon_therapy
The bottom line – wait for the results of properly designed large Phase 3 clinical trials. Don't allow panic to bust the drug testing & approval system. We worked very hard in the past to get it as good as it is now.
