By David Shaw Covid-19 raises dozens of fascinating ethical issues, but you might not know it from looking at the narrow focus of many ethics papers published since the pandemic began. Most of these papers have focused on the issue of allocating scarce resources in intensive care units, because of the anticipated pressure on these […]
Latest articles
How should the risks of infecting research participants with SARS-CoV-2 be assessed?
By Susan Bull, Euzebiusz Jamrozik, Ariella Binik, Michael Parker Vaccine development processes typically take ten to twenty years. The exceptional pace of COVID-19 vaccine research has resulted in early human trials being commenced with vaccine candidates. Calls have been made to conduct controlled human infection studies (CHIs), also known as challenge studies, with SARS-CoV-2 to […]
Ethical oversight during COVID-19: rewriting the norms of research ethics review?
By Anna Chiumento and Lucy Frith One consequence of physical distancing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been the rapid suspension or adaptation of ongoing research activity. This presents an opportunity for the research ethics community and researchers to promote ethical oversight that integrates the situated and informed judgement of researchers, rebalancing away from […]
Is Research Ethics Committee review of most clinical trials fundamentally broken?
By Mark Yarborough Imagine that you suffered from a fatal neurodegenerative disorder like Alzheimers or ALS, or that you had a serious chronic condition like hypertension or heart disease. Imagine further that you were asked to participate in a clinical trial related to your disease. Finally, imagine that the person recruiting you into the trial […]
Pandemic priority decisions and triage, from good to ugly
By Hans Flaatten, Michael Beil, and Susannah Leaver. The present COVID-19 pandemic has fuelled discussions regarding the prospects and limitations of treatment in critically ill patients. This commentary describes a framework for understanding pandemic triage ranging from “business as usual” (“good”) to the extreme depletion of all resources (“ugly”). This is illustrated with different stages […]
COVID, Systemic Racism Protests, Anti-Lockdown Protests: Making Sense Of It All
By Austin Lam. A recent article highlighted an uncomfortable yet unassailable issue: “the way the public health narrative around coronavirus has reversed itself overnight seems an awful lot like … politicizing science.” Alternatively, another article frames this political element as itself the impetus to justify protests against systemic racism in the context of racism as […]
Seizing a Pap smear to catch a criminal? Ethical issues of forensic use of medical biobanks
By Nina de Groot. A couple of years ago, during my studies, I assisted with a surgical removal of a benign uterine tumor at a small local hospital. As not much else was happening that day, I decided to follow the tumor out of the operation room all the way down to the pathologist in […]
Herd immunity and lifting lockdowns: a new trolley problem?
By Ezio Di Nucci How does pursuing herd immunity compare with lifting lockdowns, from an ethical point of view? The (moral) problem with the pursuit of herd immunity under a pandemic such as COVID-19 is that getting more than half of the population infected (the herd immunity threshold is at least 60%), given a CFR […]
Death during COVID-19: Redefining terminal illness
By Samantha W. Stein and Justin T. Clapp IDENTIFYING A GAP IN TRIAGE MODELS As floodwaters rose and resources dwindled inside Memorial Medical Center in the days following Hurricane Katrina, patient Emmett Everett pleaded with nurses: “Don’t let them leave me behind.” Everett sought to be evacuated to the safety of another hospital alongside nearly […]
Supra-institutional transparency: a first step towards recovering from the COVID-19 wound
By Benjamin Herreros, Pablo Gella, Diego Real de Asúa In the wake of the first COVID-19 wave, the latest news media cycles in Spain have been filled with alarming headlines on the need to investigate the triage criteria used during the epidemic. The State’s Attorney’s Office is undertaking preliminary investigations into several hospitals in the […]