[cstross]

There's no way to sort out misdeeds, eg, fake cures from real attempts if we lift the normal trial and liability procedures. No one would use untrialed drugs if they had to take the full liability.

I'm ready to assume that medics treating an emergency epidemic are unlikely to knowingly turn to quack remedies -- homeopathic or bogus ones -- as opposed to items like ZMapp, a monoclonal antibody treatment by a well-regulated pharmaceutical company that just happens not to have been approved for human clinical trials yet.

http://www.cdc.gov/vhf/ebola/outbreaks/guinea/qa-experimenta...

Furthermore, let me add that conducting a randomized controlled clinical trial (for effectiveness and safety) when dealing with a pathogenic infection with a > 50% fatality rate is arguably unethical: you can collect data on clinical applications and apply a retrospective control sample of patients to determine whether it improved the outcome where it was used, but withholding a potentially effective treatment becomes extremely problematic under some circumstances -- the historic classic example was zidovudine for HIV, which was rushed through human trials into use in just 27 months because it was the first effective treatment for a then-100% fatal disease (HIV). (Some of the double-blind trials were short-circuited when it became apparent that continuing to alternate patients with placebo controls was likely to be injurious.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zidovudine