What's "responsible" about putting the breaks on technological progress, when that technological progress has statistically-positive net QALY effects?
Let me give a concrete example: what would be "responsible" about doing a 10-year FDA trial to approve a novel anti-cancer therapy, for a cancer that currently has no existing treatment?
Even if this novel cancer treatment killed 50% of the people treated, if the rest went into remission, that'd be 50% more people who would be not dead at the end of the treatment, than if there was no treatment. We'd still be better off approving it immediately; and every day we'd delay to be "responsible" would be lives lost that could have been saved!
Obviously, no real technology kills 50% of people while preventing the other 50% from dying of some horrible disease. But real technologies might do things very analogous to this. For example, the Haber-Bosch process. Contributes to global warming; but also enables 10x as many people to have food to eat.
If you don't see how PFAS are an example of this kind of "benefits in lives saved outweigh whatever risk" technology: what chemical do you think is used in the lining of IV tubes to prevent the growth of bacterial biofilms? (This is the likely highest lifetime source of PFAS exposure for the average person. But it's also a necessary one!)
And, in fact, why do you think the contact lenses are using PFAS? Same idea. The benefit (not potentially getting a bacterial eye infection) severely outweighs any potential risk. PFAS in your eye could mean that your eye is slightly — in a way that's hard enough to measure that we haven't yet noticed it in clinical practice — more likely to get [some disease we aren't aware of] over the long term. But putting a contact lens without PFAS in your eye, means that your eye is quite a bit more likely to get infected, and need to be removed, or possibly even transmit an infection right into your brain!
"The constant pressure from the nosepads and arms of glasses on your face, has potentially deleterious long-term consequences to the lymphatic channels of the face, resulting in increased incidence of sinus pressure headaches, fibromyalgia, middle-ear infections leading to tinnitus, and potentially even blockages of glymphatic drainage leading to increased likelihood of brain aneurism in old age."
...is the sort of thing the FDA would say, if you had just invented glasses today; before then demanding a 20-year longitudinal cohort study to disprove those possible risks. (They might also list all those same risk factors for wearing a hat.)
My point being — we can come up with all sorts of plausible potential risks of literally any technology, new or old. There are plenty of subtle long-term consequences of our interactions with everyday objects that nobody has ever stopped to consider; anything can potentially be doing esoteric bad things to us.
But if we invented prescription glasses today, and everyone until now had been just walking around nearsighted — bumping into things, unable to legally drive, etc — for lack of them; then should we hold off on allowing them to be sold, until we do such a study? Or should we accept that being able to see outweighs a bunch of entirely-hypothetical risks?
Or, on a related note, how about this: would it have been "responsible" to prevent people from getting laser eye surgery, out of concern that it might make their night vision worse?
I'm not really sure what you're getting at. You can get glasses now and not put PFAS in your eye and have improved vision. Some people don't like wearing glasses and would prefer contacts. Maybe they can make an informed decision between long term discomfort and the very low increased possibility of a future eye disease? People aren't good at long term thinking though.
re laser eye surgery, there was a story pretty recently about the number of post surgery issues being downplayed and under-represented. If you had a full and true picture of the risks then you might avoid laser eye surgery, but people running laser eye surgery clinics don't want you to have all the information.
Those people saved by cancer treatments or IV drips should die, for the environment of course(!) This is what they really believe so you can be damn sure they will make you poorer by denying you the luxury of contact lenses. And they'd have a more acceptable excuse of "wear glasses".
Let me give a concrete example: what would be "responsible" about doing a 10-year FDA trial to approve a novel anti-cancer therapy, for a cancer that currently has no existing treatment?
Even if this novel cancer treatment killed 50% of the people treated, if the rest went into remission, that'd be 50% more people who would be not dead at the end of the treatment, than if there was no treatment. We'd still be better off approving it immediately; and every day we'd delay to be "responsible" would be lives lost that could have been saved!
Obviously, no real technology kills 50% of people while preventing the other 50% from dying of some horrible disease. But real technologies might do things very analogous to this. For example, the Haber-Bosch process. Contributes to global warming; but also enables 10x as many people to have food to eat.
If you don't see how PFAS are an example of this kind of "benefits in lives saved outweigh whatever risk" technology: what chemical do you think is used in the lining of IV tubes to prevent the growth of bacterial biofilms? (This is the likely highest lifetime source of PFAS exposure for the average person. But it's also a necessary one!)
And, in fact, why do you think the contact lenses are using PFAS? Same idea. The benefit (not potentially getting a bacterial eye infection) severely outweighs any potential risk. PFAS in your eye could mean that your eye is slightly — in a way that's hard enough to measure that we haven't yet noticed it in clinical practice — more likely to get [some disease we aren't aware of] over the long term. But putting a contact lens without PFAS in your eye, means that your eye is quite a bit more likely to get infected, and need to be removed, or possibly even transmit an infection right into your brain!