Two weeks later David Bennett is alive, his pig’s heart beating soundly

Unlikely. What's more likely is that something else interferes with the absorption.

Anyway, don't just take my word at face value, have a sample tested: liquid chromatography can give you an answer quickly. Also, don't buy on amazon where cheap fakes and inventory comingling make the problem unsolvable.

Grab a monster energy drink: content in L-Carnitine is guaranteed,

>Moderna had the mRNA vaccine for Covid ready in about 3 weeks. This means the tech was already there

Not quite. While this line of research has been occurring for some time, it wasn't quite at that point yet. It wasn't developed and not being used because testing them would be considered unethical. It was developing technology, and Covid came at an opportune time in that things were close enough for researchers to rush things along.

>But no, we needed a pandemic and 10 months of testing to start using it, because it wasn't "ethical".

Yes, we did need testing before we started using it. It could make everyone sick for all we know. Or perhaps only a select few populations. Testing also allows guidance to be developed on what expect, and what doctors need to look out for. If it were to cause bleeding in people with a certain blood type, for example, then just giving it out would result in huge numbers of people rushing to already overworked ER rooms. Which could just worsen the health crisis we were trying to avoid. There are many good reasons to test treatments even when time is limited

>We as a society shy away from doing things which we _know_ would save more lives in the aggregate because we'd have to risk causing much less harm, but harm which we'd be directly responsible for.

Y I'll take this logic further and say why not do some DNA alteration experiments on babies? We may have to destroy the specimens after, but so what? A finite number of lives can lead to saving countless lives in the future. Think of the things we could learn about rare diseases, removing harmful genes, improving human health, etc. The millions, even billions of lives we could save and enrich. It's immoral NOT to do that, when the rewards are so great.

That's the line of thinking that doctors try to avoid, hence "do no harm". It doesn't matter how common sense it seems, some lines you just don't cross. Because if people do cross those lines, eventually some might use it to justify doing immoral things. There's certainly a lot of rigorous debate about medical ethics, but these decisions are the results of groups of doctors and ethicicts. I'm of the belief that the alternatives have indeed been considered in most cases and the best choice has been made.

We're not talking about slippery slope here and "may have beens", we're talking about already having a soft form of worst case scenario, and _still_ not bringing out the big guns. Not doing challenge trials for Covid is just stupid, no matter how you try to push it.

"DNA alteration experiments on babies" - we do that, actually, and I'm seriously considering waiting on having a family until they become mainstream. It's a pretty cool tech, they had the first designer baby out last year. Just putting the scariest form you can think of in writing isn't an argument in itself, you know. You also have to say why it's a bad idea. Otherwise, no offense and please don't take it personally, but it's purely equivalent of somebody saying 200 years ago: "what's the next step, feeding MOLD to BABIES?". Turns out yes, feeding mold to babies is exactly what we're supposed to do. It's just progress - it looks weird until it's in the kitchen cabinet.

The mRNA vaccine not being ready - it's just incredibly improbable that you had three major corporations being able to "rush things along" and finish exactly at the same time. It's 10x to 100x more probable that they were already finished and stuck at some regulatory step.

And a final thought - please don't interpret my comments to say testing and regulation in general is bad. FDA is bad, and probably should be destroyed outright and something else, something much leaner, built instead. But some regulation and a lot of testing are of course necessary. It's just that currently 1. they've gone waaaay beyond what's needed and into pure bureaucracy and 2. the system is such that it ignores major slices of reality and focuses only on what's in front of their eyes, i.e. they don't do challenge trials because it's not ethical for the volunteers, but if they lead to 1% less death overall this means tens to hundreds of thousands saved - which they ignore.