COVID-19 Vaccine ethics: Covid could come back stronger if rich nations monopolise doses“The news that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine may prove up to 90 per cent effective at preventing symptoms of Covid has sparked something approaching euphoria across the globe. Stock markets have soared and there is speculation everything could return to “normal” by the spring. But with this […]

Responses to the UK COVID-19 Challenge Studies:  “In a pandemic, time is lives.  So far, over a million people have died. “There is a moral imperative to develop to a safe and effective vaccine – and to do so as quickly as possible.  Challenge studies are one way of accelerating vaccine research.  They are ethical […]

In an essay published in Scientific American, we call for immediate and intensive research into the possibility that exposure to one of the coronaviruses that cause the common cold could decrease the severity of Covid-19, and could be leveraged to expand what’s been called
“pre-existing” immunity to the disease by deliberate transmission of common cold coronaviruses. Here, we expand on our proposal.

The post Could the Common Cold Help Stop Covid-19? We Need to Know–Now. appeared first on The Hastings Center.

As multiple Covid vaccine candidates enter clinical trials and hopefully move closer to approval, one important unanswered question is how to compensate the rare cases of serious vaccine harm.

The post Fair Compensation for Rare Vaccine Harms appeared first on The Hastings Center.

Education and COVID-19 An Ethical Opening for Higher Ed Institutions “The job of IRBs is to approve research involving human subjects. The ethicists, scientists and community members who staff the IRBs do risk-benefit analyses before they allow a proposed experiment to go forward. Unlike hospitals — nearly all of which have ethics committees — colleges typically […]

This editorial appears in the September issue of the American Journal of Bioethics

by David Magnus, PhD

This issue features a set of articles addressing allocation issues for drugs for COVID-19 that have not been approved by the FDA but are available through either Emergency Use Authorization or Expanded Access Programs (EAP).…

STUDENT VOICES | CHYNN PRIZE SECOND-PLACE WINNERBy Elizabeth Wood Last semester I read Carl Elliott’s “The Best-Selling, Billion Dollar Pills Tested on Homeless People.” He introduces a concerning ethical dilemma, namely, the use of homeless populations as participants in phase 1 drug trials. Learning about this practice made me very uncomfortable. As a student at […]

by Kei Mukohara, MD, Ph.D., Tsunetoshi Mogi, MD

COVID-19 REGISRY JAPAN（COVIREGI-JP, its official website [In Japanese]）is an ongoing government-funded national registry study conducted principally at the National Center for Global Health and Medicine in collaboration with Fujita Health University, Hokkaido University, National Institute of Infectious Diseases and pharmaceutical companies.…

The Covid-19 pandemic is unlikely to end until there is a safe, effective, and widely distributed vaccine. How soon can researchers achieve this goal? The answer largely depends on which strategies researchers are willing to adopt. One potential strategy is to conduct human challenge studies, in which researchers give an experimental vaccine to healthy volunteers and then test—or “challenge”—the vaccine by purposely exposing volunteers to the virus. Although a growing number of voices are calling on researchers to employ this strategy, the proposal is generating a heated debate about the ethics of such research.

The post Accepting the Challenge: Covid Vaccine Challenge Trials Can Be Ethically Justified appeared first on The Hastings Center.

Experts in infectious disease and public health warn that the Covid-19 pandemic will be with us until there is an effective vaccine, possibly 12 to 18 months in the future. This situation has given rise to calls for human challenge studies, in which healthy volunteers are injected with an experimental vaccine and then infected with the disease to test the vaccine’s efficacy. Is this ethically justifiable?

The post Human Challenge Studies for Covid-19 Vaccine: Questions about Benefits and Risks appeared first on The Hastings Center.