Crowdsourcing medical decisions: Ethicists worry Josh Hardy case may set bad precedent

Just hours after social-media supporters of a dying 7-year-old boy pressured a reluctant biotech company into giving him an experimental medication, the backlash began. Is “it rite to save 1 child an[d] not the rest?” wondered one commenter on a news forum. “It’s really not fair to the thousands of others that were turned down just because they didn’t make a big public outcry,” said another.

The Herald-Sun newspaper in Durham, N.C., where the company that makes the drug is based, said it was glad for the boy’s sake that he was able to get the medicine. “But the process leaves us pained,” the editorial board wrote. “This is no way to make health-care decisions.”

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Article originally published by The Washington Post