News and blogs

John Coggon, co-chair of our advisory board on the environment and health, shares insights from the Oxford Global Health and Bioethics International Conference.

What then does ethical preparedness mean? There is still a great deal of work to do to explore the full scope of such a concept. However, drawing on the lessons from COVID, we suggest the following three elements are likely to play an important role.

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics warmly welcomes new guidelines by UKRI and UNICEF that aim to help grant reviewers consider ethical issues when reviewing proposals for research in fragile and conflict-affected contexts.

We welcome the decision of the World Health Assembly to develop an international agreement on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response under the Constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO).

Our ethical compass – proposed in our report on global health emergencies as a way of using shared values to work through ethical dilemmas – is to be adopted as a guide for Research Ethics Committee processes in the Philippines.

Just over a year ago we closed our 2-year long in-depth inquiry and published our final report ‘Research in global health emergencies: ethical issues’.

Just at the point where vaccine trials are showing promise, levels of infection circulating in the general population in the UK are relatively low. This is obviously good news from many perspectives – but makes the next stage of testing more difficult. Is one possible answer human challenge trials?

We welcome the funder principles for research in epidemics and pandemics, set out by the UK Collaborative on Development Research (UKCDR) and the Global Research Collaboration for Infectious Disease Preparedness (GloPID-R).

Yesterday, the UK Government launched the NHS COVID-19 vaccine research registry. We welcome this registry.

We, together with The Global Health Network, have launched a Spanish translation of a new e-learning course for researchers covering the core ethical issues that arise when conducting research in global health emergencies.