We just walked out and quit the study today. Stanford medical dropped all masking requirements and the researchers running the long-Covid paxlovid study have stopped masking while tending to long covid participants. It’s frankly abhorrent, selfish behavior, and not only does it demonstrate a complete lack of regard and understanding for the illness in question, in my opinion it calls into question the legitimacy of the entire study. We’ve been traveling hundreds of miles for months in order to try to participate in their study and provide THEM with data about the illness, and this is what they think of us. Just want to make everyone aware in case you also have the misfortune of being a participant.
EDIT: Aside from the obvious lack of regard for the safety and well being of their patients/subjects, I should point out that this is also just a terrible choice for the study. Want to know how to get consistent study results? I'll give you a hint: it doesn't involve dramatically changing the study conditions 3/4 of the way through. Not only are they callously risking people's health, they risk invalidating the entire project and its data by suddenly increasing the odds of reinfecting their participants and negatively changing the course of their health.
They tell you to chart everything, but I've definitely withheld shit when patients disclose stuff to me like I'm not charting sex work history because that gets you put into the "DrUg SeEKinG BeHavIor RiSk" bucket apparently to doctors. Which is annoying because it could have real implications for future care if they treated people like they were people.
Thank you for your service.
Right, it definitely gets people killed. It must happen all the time that someone with a history of addiction comes in with some legitimate pain stemming from an extremely dangerous medical condition. But instead of doing their jobs and finding out what is causing it, all too often the doctor chooses instead to give them a stern lecture and send them home with some tylenols. Pat on the back, hurray, we stopped a junkie from getting their next fix.
The medical system and the war on drugs it is subservient to is making the implicit choice that stopping someone from getting high is much more highly prioritized than making sure someone's cancer, or appendicitis, or kidney stones, etc is caught early. Or even caught at all, because experiences like these make people even more unwilling to see a doctor, as if the medical debt wasn't bad enough.