[intro music]

INDIGO CROSWELLER: Hi, everyone. I'm Indigo, and I'm going to be doing a first negative speech-- so a first response speech-- in response to Eli's first affirmative on the topic 'That we should allow people to opt in to experimental medical trials.'

If you haven't watched Eli's speech yet, that's obviously something you should watch first. But I'm going to get started with the first negative speech, implementing some of the things that we talked about in terms of first response speeches. So, look out for those things here.

Under side affirmative, people no longer get to know that they're in their last few months with their family. They no longer get to prepare for the end of their life. They no longer get to say goodbye, and they no longer get to come to terms and really come to peace with the life that they have had.

Instead, these people either feel pressure from their families, who do not want them to die and therefore have to make rushed decisions to enter trials, which are already rushed through, where they are treated poorly, where they likely experience unprecedented and unadvised or ill-advised side effects. Or they feel this societal burden to do this thing, which is now good for all of mankind, as Eli described.

That is an unbearable weight to put on people who are already extremely vulnerable, people who are already afraid. We tell you we should not put them in even more compromised positions.

Three things in this speech. The first thing I'm going to do is some responsive material about people's right to choice. The second thing is some integrated responsive and substantive material on these people's capacity to consent, and the third thing is more integrated material about medical development and which side gets better outcomes there.

First, on people's right to choice, note that a right to choice about your body is not as concrete or universal as Eli wants to describe it, because we regulate people's right to choice about their body all the time. Governments regulate people constantly. People do not own their physical body after death. You cannot even, as a fully conscious, cogent, fully healthy 40-year-old, determine exactly what is going to happen with your body. We regulate the choices that are available to you in that.

The second thing to say is that we don't even allow lots of people to make relatively inconsequential decisions about their bodies at various points. For instance, it is regulated when and what age and in what state you are allowed to do things like tattoo your body or get piercings and note that that is extremely inconsequential in comparison to a decision to take drugs which are experimental, noting that they might make you extremely physically ill, or even cause you death in the most extreme circumstances. So, it seems odd that we would now allow these people to make that decision.

So, what is it again contingent on? There is no absolute right to choice about your body. It is dependent on whether or not you are able to make informed decisions about that. We tell you that that depends on consent.

So, this is where I'm going to do some integrated material now. Because note that my substantive on consent is directly responsive to Eli's material about why these people have informed consent and can, therefore, make this choice. The first thing I'm going to do is explain to you why these people cannot consent. There's 2 elements to this. The first is on whether or not this decision is informed, and the second is on choice.

On whether or not this decision is informed-- Eli models in, in setup, that these people will have to receive supervision and also a severe-- like an extreme level of disclaimers from doctors and other medical professionals to the extent that those companies who do medical trials already have to give those. One response to this-- doctors and other medical professionals are unlikely to possess or fully understand the risks or side effects. Insofar as this is experimental, as Eli characterises, we do not possess all of the information.

So, it is actually impossible for these people to be fully informed about the decision they are making. It is actually impossible for the advising parties who are regulating this to even possess enough information to give a full disclaimer, which Eli characterises. So, these people cannot have the information.

But the second thing to say is that in the status quo, when we allow companies to do other kinds of medical trials which have passed the experimental stage, there are lots of instances where they do exploitative or terrible things to the participants in those trials, because these companies have massive incentives not to give full disclaimers, for the reason that these trials are often bad, or make people feel unwell, or cause undesirable side effects. So, they do things like hide results. They do things like hide the possibility of side effects.

And that means that those people are not informed on the decisions. They do not have all of the information, because it is adverse to the incentives of the companies who are running these trials. They will hide things. They will not fully inform people.

The second is part of choice because Eli tells us that it's important that we entitle people to these choices about the end of their lives. Particularly given that they are the only people who are able to make this trade-off, she does some characterisation about their ability to possess information about themselves as opposed to the government.

A couple of things to say here. The first is to say that the government doesn't need to understand the specifics of every single person's situation to understand that, generally, the kinds of people who are making these decisions are going to be characterised in the way that Eli explains it, in that you are likely to be desperate, you are likely to have no other alternative. And so, you are likely to opt in to this, either so that you yourself have some hope or so that your life has meaning for other people by developing medical research.

That is to say that these people likely have no other alternative, and to say that you then have a choice about whether to do this or not is illusory because there is no choice if your alternative is death. You are just desperate in that situation. And so rather at the split moment when someone finds out that they might not survive the next few months, rather than saying, well, actually you can do this thing which might extend your life or might solve this problem, people should be able to pass that initial stage of grief and come to terms with the likelihood under both sides that they are still going to die. They should be able to have certainty around that, to prepare themselves, to prepare their families.

The aff explains that it is better to allow these people that hope than just to ensure that they are going to die by having no alternative or no experimental trial. We say it is actually far worse and that it is better for people's happiness. It is better for their families to have certainty about that than a choice which is predestined because they are told it in a desperate moment.

Note that there is a tension in the aff setup because they say that people are so desperate and have no alternative, but they also say that they will be informed and fully rational in making this decision. Those two things cannot exist. They only exist in tension. Either these people are so desperate that they're likely to opt in to a trial which is experimental in nature, or these people can be fully informed, make fully rational and objective decisions about what is best for them.

We say, at the point at which these people have this decision presented to them, they are not going to make rational decisions. They are not able to be fully informed by the nature of the trial, and, therefore, they cannot consent to this decision, and it is immoral for the affirmative to present it to them. So, that is why these people cannot consent, and they, therefore, are not entitled to right about choice for their body. As a result of that, the government is fully legitimate in preventing these people from accessing experimental trials.

Final thing I'm going to do in this speech is explain why you get worse medical progress when you allow experimental trials to happen. Note that if I prove the things in this issue in the speech, it responds implicitly to Eli's last point of substantive about the way that this practically benefits medical progress and research in society.

First, why is the quality of this medical progress worse? It is instinctively and intuitively more rushed. Eli herself uses the words skipping steps to explain why you get faster medical progress. We tell you that that necessarily means the quality of the outcomes of these trials are far worse. You are likely to skip the steps.

Note also that the people that Eli characterises as the largest group to opt in to these are people who have no alternative or are likely desperate. They may only have a few months left of their life, which necessarily means that medical trials need to happen more quickly. So, you are going to get worse results.

The second thing to say is that it is now harder to ensure the integrity or legitimacy of these results because the kinds of people who can now opt in to them are not people who are fully healthy when they enter the trial. They are people who are willing to take risks, for the reason that there are lots of other issues which may result in different side effects. These people have lots of other illnesses and complex health needs, which means it's difficult to isolate the specific health outcomes from this trial specifically. So, you get worse results overall, and it's harder to get good solutions out of them.

Note that Eli characterises the scope of medical research and medical development already and explains that it is often that funding is allocated only to urgent or mass impact things. So, note that that is also her biggest benefit because she says things like vaccine development happens much more quickly.

We tell you that the COVID vaccine development is an example of exactly why the status quo works. Because where medical progress has to be immediate or very quick under the status quo, that can happen. We are happy to fast-track in those extremely rare instances. We are happy to allocate more funding. It gets more attention. You get better medical progress when it is needed.

We tell you that we prefer the status quo. Even if it means that it takes a couple of extra months, we believe the quality is so much better, and the impact of that high-quality research is more significant, and in the instances where it is so, so important, such as the development of vaccines in response to a pandemic, we tell you we can already get quick outcomes under the status quo, so we are happy to oppose this model.