From the BMJ Health & Care Informatics: This special issue aims to bring together the growing community of healthcare practitioners, social scientists, policymakers, engineers and computer scientists to design and discuss practical solutions to address algorithmic fairness and accountability. We are inviting papers that explore ways to reduce machine bias in healthcare or create algorithms that […]
Latest articles
When the going gets tough, where do persons with disabilities stand? Covid-19 pandemic, community-centered medicine and scarce health resources allocation
By Nicola Panocchia, Viola D’Ambrosio, Serafino Corti, Eluisa Lo Presti, Marco Bertelli, Maria Luisa Scattoni, and Filippo Ghelma The COVID-19 pandemic led to a shift in the medical paradigm from person-centered medicine to community-centered medicine. This shift gives “priority to community health above that of the individual patient in allocating scarce resources”. The patient-physician relationship […]
How could a pandemic be managed ethically? The rationale for updating the WHO guidance.
By Abha Saxena, Paul Bouvier, Ehsan Shamsi-Gooshki, Johannes Köhler, Lisa Schwartz As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, an impressive global research effort was quickly launched to shed light on the subject. Virologists set about dismantling the virus. Pharmacologists began to develop vaccines. Clinicians tested and established treatment strategies against COVID-19. The tools of science were able […]
COVID-19 human challenge volunteers are neither doing too little, nor helping too late
By Abie Rohrig and David Manheim The world’s first COVID-19 human challenge trial began in early March, with around a dozen healthy, consenting volunteers between the ages of 18-30 deliberately exposed to the virus at a quarantine facility in London. Getz and Baylis recently argued that the questionable harm-benefit ratio of COVID-19 challenge trials make them […]
Challenge studies for COVID-19: Now is not the time
By Landon J Getz and Francoise Baylis hVIVO, a for-profit clinical research organization in London, in collaboration with Imperial College London, has initiated a human challenge study in youth between the ages of 18 and 30 to determine the dose at which individuals become infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The dose-ranging study, […]
What money can’t buy: Why we shouldn’t pay people to get vaccinated
By Nancy S. Jecker A utilitarian thinks ethics is a lot like math. We want to produce the greatest good. If a disease will create a lot of harm and a vaccine will create a lot of good, we should do what it takes to get shots in arms. If it takes paying people, then […]
The first-year anniversary of the application of telemedicine to early medical abortions in UK
By Ilaria Bertini The 30th of March 2021 marks an year since the UK Government implemented the new guidelines on medical abortion in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks to the use of telemedicine women’s homes have been approved as a class of place for both stages of early medical abortion (EMA up to 10 […]
Coffee or covid?
By Stephen John and Emma Curran. For the past year, the surprisingly popular Costa Coffee shop down the street has been either shut or takeaway only. As a result, lots of people have missed out on their regular caffeine hit. Of course, there’s a good reason for closing Costa: to stop the spread of COVID-19. […]
Values, value and valued
By Raj Mohindra. The idea of trying to reconnect values to the value produced for patients came from direct personal experience on the wards, in the clinic and in the ethics committee. Clinical ethics does not operate in a vacuum. In the past clinicians had the power to decide and were rightly held accountable for […]
Is transhumanism a health problem?
By Michael Kowalik. In medical sciences, health is measured by reference to our species-typical anatomy and functional integrity – the objective standard of human health. Proponents of transhumanism are committed to biomedical enhancement of human beings by augmenting our species-typical anatomy and functional integrity. I argue that this normative impasse is not only a problem […]