By Nir Eyal and Tobias Gerhard Perhaps the strongest argument against COVID challenge trials posits that they must choose between the Scylla of insufficient safety for volunteers and the Charybdis of insufficient social value. In particular, challenge trials that exclude old or unhealthy participants for their own safety may involve surprisingly low risk, but they […]
Latest articles
Paying more for highly specialised technologies: equity or profligacy?
By Jonathan Michaels The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) recently consulted on possible revisions to its processes for health technology evaluation. An important aspect of the proposed changes related to topic selection criteria for the Highly Specialised Technologies (HST) programme. This is of great commercial interest as it allows some technologies to […]
Civil commitment for opioid misuse: The need for an ethical use framework
By John C Messinger, Daniel J Ikeda, Ameet Sarpatwari In the 12 months prior to September 2020, there were over 66,000 fatal opioid overdoses in the United States, a 36% increase over the previous year. Many scholars have hypothesized that this dramatic rise was driven at least in part by conditions brought on by the […]
Does it work what clinical ethicists do – and how do we evaluate it?
By Joschka Haltaufderheide, Stephan Nadolny, Jochen Vollmann, and Jan Schildmann. Clinical ethical case consultations have been widely implemented in clinical practice. It has been hailed as important tool to support clinical decision making. At the same time, it is a matter of debate what ethical case consultations actually do contribute to clinical practice and what […]
Is medico-legal paternalism still rife in UK paediatric best interest decisions?
By Michal Pruski. The UK case of Alta Fixsler is reigniting the debate on paediatric best interest decisions in the case of end of life considerations. The two-year old’s Jewish parents want her to be transferred to Israel to be taken care of by clinicians sharing their religious and moral outlooks. Meanwhile the NHS trust […]
The doctor can “see” you now – the ethical considerations of patient rights and safeguards in online mental health act assessments during Covid-19
By Lisa Schölin and Arun Chopra. It is fair to say that when the pandemic hit we were not entirely prepared to move our social lives, work, and healthcare to online platforms. Yet, we had to. But in which services, and more specifically in what situations, can remote contact sufficiently, legally, and safely be used […]
Do controlled human infection studies put bystanders at higher risk than conventional field trials?
By Kyungdo Lee and Nir Eyal. A dose-determining study toward the world’s first controlled human infection (abbreviated as CHI) COVID vaccine study has launched in the UK. A COVID vaccine CHI would typically enroll a few dozen young and healthy volunteers, excluding people at higher risk of severe outcomes. After admission to an isolated research […]
Knowledge, power, and patients: The ethics of open notes
By Charlotte Blease, Catherine DesRoches, Maria Hägglund, Adam Hayden, Hanife Rexhepi, & Liz Salmi Most of us now use the internet to check the health of our bank balance. Worldwide, however, the majority of patients still cannot inspect their actual healthcare records online. From April 5 in the USA the law changed. With few exceptions […]
Making a killing: The imperative to waive COVID-19 vaccine intellectual property rights
By Harry Hudson Recent lobbying disclosures revealed that over 100 lobbyists have been deployed to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) by the pharmaceutical industry to block generic manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines. The background here is that the richest countries have over half the purchased vaccine doses, yet only 16% of the global population. This has […]
Ethics guidance for biobanking practice in low-and middle-income-countries during COVID-19
By Shenuka Singh, Rosemary Jean Cadigan and Keymanthri Moodley Biobanking has the potential to make valuable contributions to health research through the collection, storage and sharing of human samples and data for research purposes. During the COVID-19 pandemic, storing samples for future research is a public health imperative. There are, however, several ethical concerns. These […]