By Hao Wang. Theresa Xu, ‘the first Chinese single woman to sue for her right to freeze eggs,’ lost her lawsuit last year. In 2020, Xu, then 30, sought to freeze eggs in a hospital in Beijing. Xu was not ready to be a mother then, but thought she might want to be one in the future. Therefore, she […]
Category: Regulation and Regulators
EU’s compulsory licensing proposals, patents and crisis preparedness – Some steps in the right direction but more to do for future pandemic preparedness
By Aisling McMahon. Patents are intellectual property rights (IPRs) which allow rightsholders to stop others using the patented technology – e.g. a medicine – without the rightsholders permission (via a license) for the patent term (usually 20 years). Rightsholders can develop an income stream from the technology, as licenses are granted in return for compensation. […]
College vaccine mandates benefitted students and society
By Leo Lam and Taylor Nichols. The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly disrupted the operation of our society. To cope with a novel virus to which humans had no immunity, public health authorities took a multitude of actions such as lockdowns, mandates on non-pharmaceutical interventions such as masks, and later on vaccines in specific circumstances to […]
Housestaff unionization in the United States and our duties to each other
By Karel-Bart Celie. In a recent issue of JAMA, Ahmed et al. published data on healthcare unionization in the United States between 2009 and 2021. Despite the observed association between unionization and higher wages, better benefits, and more equitable compensation, unionization among healthcare workers has evidently remained low. Richman and Schulman (R&S) wrote a commentary […]
Should doctors help patients import medicines?
By Narcyz Ghinea. In the mid 2010s, breakthrough medicines that promised to cure hepatitis C came onto the market. The catch was, the pharmaceutical company Gilead set the price of up to £70 000 for a 3-month course of treatment. No government would pay that much given the number of people with hepatitis C. In the […]
Ethics, iBlastoids, and brain organoids: Time to revise antiquated laws and processes
By Julian Savulescu. Jose Polo and his team at Monash University have successfully reprogrammed human adult cells (fibroblasts – skin cells) to form “iBlastoids”. These are structures which are like early human embryos. Normally when a sperm enters an egg, it produces a new cell, which divides, and these cells divide until a blastocyst is formed […]
Up close and personal: Using AI to predict patient preferences?
By Nikola Biller-Andorno. Have you ever tried to put together a ballpoint pen that has fallen apart? Or, more ambitiously, tried to repair your child’s programmable toy robot that continues to bump into walls? There is nothing like building, taking apart and rebuilding to understand a gadget or system’s flaws and weaknesses. This is what […]
Informed consent and medical device registries
By Daniel B. Kramer, Elizabeth Roe and Efthimios Parasidis. Regulators charged with evaluating new medical devices face several unenviable trade-offs. Extensive pre-market evaluation may delay market entry for useful technology, but a rushed assessment may fail to identify important safety concerns. Rigorous post-market studies may help balance these competing concerns, but must also weigh the […]
Is it irrational not to have a plan? Should there have been national guidance on rationing in the NHS?
By Dominic Wilkinson and Jonathan Pugh. Last April, in the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of academics, lawyers, doctors and ethicists wrote publicly about the need for national ethical guidance relating to resource allocation (e.g., see here, here, here). At the time there was concern that there would be insufficient intensive care […]
Prize, Not a Price: How the right reward could solve the problem of kidney failure
By Aksel Braanen Sterri. Worldwide 1.2 million people are dying from kidney failure each year. The best treatment for kidney failure is a kidney transplant from a living donor, but too few people are willing to donate. In the paper, Prize, Not a Price: Reframing Rewards for Kidney Donors, I defend a way to meet […]