News and blogs

In most emergencies, affected communities play a key role in initiating and leading response activities – in stark contrast to the stereotype of people overwhelmed by the emergency waiting helplessly for help from outsiders.

For a week or so now the public discourse on the UK’s COVID-19 epidemic has been shifting from the horror of the daily death count to the hope that there may be a way of relaxing the restrictions that have been placed on citizens’ freedom of movement and assembly.

A mantra of recent government policy reporting in recent weeks is that they are only following the science. The science recommended the lockdown, and the science will let us know when it can be relaxed, apparently. It tells us what tests need to be done for whom and what protective equipment is needed for whom. How exactly can it do this?

Join us as we consider some of the issues that may be particularly challenging and important in connection with COVID-19 research in low and middle income settings.

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics and Involve have jointly written to the Prime Minister today setting out suggestions for greater transparency and public involvement as the UK moves towards phase two of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In their recent statement on digital contact tracing, NHSX, the NHS Unit leading digital transformation of the NHS, acknowledge that the public will need to trust this new technology for it to be effective in tackling COVID-19, and that NHSX will seek to earn that trust by working with ‘transparent standards of privacy, security and ethics’.

The UK Government’s communication with the public has been admirably clear and simple: stay home. But it has been one-dimensional and one directional, whilst the challenges presented by COVID-19 are multiple, and they are far from simple.

Debate about how to exit from lockdown is increasing. What evidence is there that the ethical dimension of that process has been considered? So far there is little or no such evidence.

It’s amazing how much (and how many people) we trust in and how reliant we are on trust. Imagine a world in which you never trusted your doctor to try to do her best for you. In an emergency such as the present one when things are so uncertain trust matters even more. But you cannot just command trust (‘Trust me I am an expert/Minister/whatever’) and when trust has been built up over time it is very easy for it to be destroyed in an instant.

There is urgency to the situation that we all face. But urgency does not absolve those responsible for decision-making of the moral duty to involve those who are affected; to engage with the communities that they represent and seek to protect; and to be transparent about the basis on which decisions are being considered and are being made.

Join us for our second webinar, jointly organised with the Ada Lovelace Institute

The recording of our recent webinar – Ethics in the research response to COVID-19 – is now available online.