That is a valid question but another thing to note is that you wouldn’t be giving this drug to the vast majority of people who do not get any symptoms from a Covid-19 infection. Nor would you be forcing people to take this drug.
Which is a fair viewpoint from the societal level, but not as much for the individual level, which was implied in the parent message - i.e. how can "I'll take experimental treatment B instead of experimental treatment A" be an argument for not taking experimental treatments in general?
Imagine both the vaccine and the drug offer the same protection, and both come with a risk of 0.00001 that you will die from taking it.
Considering not everyone who gets infected gets symptoms, would it be illogical to not take the vaccine, just in case you get infected and get symptoms, but to take the drug once you do get infected and get symptoms?
It wouldn't be necessarily illogical but would still qualify as "taking part in an experiment trial", as put by the parent post.
To determine if this is a rational strategy or not, we'd have to get real numbers (is it really likely that 1 in 100k people die from taking the vaccine?), and compare that against the reduction in probability of dying from COVID by even combining both treatments.
It is still possible to take rational decisions in the face of unknowns. Just like you probably decided, in your opinion rationally, to take the vaccine even though there really isn’t a whole lot of data available as they are pretty new.
And please, I just made up these numbers to answer the posed question:
> how can "I'll take experimental treatment B instead of experimental treatment A" be an argument
For an individual, the antiviral is better because it means they don't need to take the vaccine with any possible risks, however small, up front. Yes once an individual become symptomatic with covid-19, they're forced to be exposed to one of the risks, but at that point the antiviral is the only choice. In short, it allows an individual to delay taking the unknown risk until there's an actual known downside to not taking it; i.e. unmitigated covid symptoms. Most people will never be exposed to that downside anyways.
From a "reducing my risk of dying" perspective, you'd have to balance the risk of dying from taking the vaccine vs the risk of dying from COVID with zero treatments, one treatment, or both treatments.
The numbers could lean either way and would be very sensitive to variations in the probabilities involved - I'm sure it would be very hard to reach any form of consensus on "probability of dying from taking the vaccine". It's also worth addressing wasn't even making the point of which (so-called) experimental treatment has a better likely outcome but rather addressing criticism at (so-called) experimental treatments in general.
From an "unknown risk" perspective, you'd also have to consider that COVID itself could have yet-unknown long-term risks.
> From an "unknown risk" perspective, you'd also have to consider that COVID itself could have yet-unknown long-term risks.
That would not factor into a correct analysis: the unknown risks of covid are the same whether or not you get vaccinated (or any other treatment) because by definition the vaccine has not been shown to mitigate the unknown risks.
