When a breast cancer drug called Herceptin passed Phase 3 clinical trials, doctors didn’t know it could cause heart failure in some patients when used with anthracycline chemotherapy drugs like doxorubicin. They only discovered this side effect during post-marketing surveillance.

That’s why clinical trials take time and are so important. Nobody knows the full effects of a new therapeutic without a large sample size and enough time to investigate actual outcomes. Desperate times may call for desperate measures, but medical ethics must never be compromised.

In fact, it’s during our most scary and fearful moments that our core ethical principles matter the most. No doctor should advocate rushing any vaccine through clinical trials or experimenting with unproven drugs like hydroxychloroquine on human beings as if they are guinea pigs.