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It has been one year since we published our briefing note on fair and equitable access to COVID-19 treatments and vaccines. A great deal has changed in the year since – we now have several COVID-19 vaccines being rolled out across the world, but issues around equitable access to them remain.

Trust in those developing, offering, and promoting vaccines plays a key role in decisions about the uptake of vaccines, says a new briefing note from the Nuffield Council on Bioethics.

A new national initiative to bring ethical thinking into pandemic policy-making launches today.

Around this time last year, I packed up my office laptop and cheerily bid farewell to colleagues, assuring them I’d see them “in a few weeks” once lockdown was over. Reader, it was not a few weeks. Over a year to the day, I have yet to return to any office and indeed, having joined the Nuffield Council a couple of months into lockdown, have yet to meet many of my new colleagues in the flesh.

Responding to suggestions that the UK Government might introduce immunity or vaccine passports, the Prime Minister in an interview on the 24th February first recognised that doing ‘stuff like this’ was a ‘novelty’.

Today we have signed the WHO’s vaccine equity declaration. The declaration calls on all countries to work together in solidarity – and in each of their best interests – to ensure that vaccination of health workers and older people will be underway in all countries within the first 100 days of the year.

We are calling on Government to issue national guidance on resource allocation in the COVID-19 pandemic.

I followed the example of Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer, who, in the wake of the announcement of two successful COVID-19 vaccines, stated that he had encouraged his elderly mother ‘to be ready.’ I did the same.

The prospect of safe and effective vaccines against COVID-19 is good news for everyone towards the end of a grim year. Of course, caution is still advisable with as yet no certainty as to how long the vaccine might work or whether there might be adverse side effects for certain groups. There are also a host of ethical issues that need to be addressed.

“It is the miracle jab that promises hope of an end to the pandemic and a longed-for return to normality.” So begins a piece by The Daily Mail’s science correspondent Victoria Allen this week…

Today, the UK Government has announced that they will work with partners to develop a COVID-19 human challenge study model. This will include the manufacture of the challenge virus and will be the first-in-human characterisation study for COVID-19.

Today the Nuffield Council on Bioethics has published a briefing on the key questions for the next phase of the UK’s response to COVID-19.