Many countries, including Australia, have established a national scheme that supports the recognition of a single ethical review for multi-centre research conducted in publicly funded health services. However, local site-specific governance review processes remain decentralised and highly variable. This short report describes the ethics and…

Over the last three quarters of a century, international guidelines and regulations have undergone significant changes in how children are problematised as participants in biomedical research. While early guidelines enacted children as vulnerable subjects with diminished autonomy and in need of special protection, beginning in the early 2000s,…

One of the key criticisms of the ethical review process is the time taken to decision, and associated resource use. A key source of delay is that most submissions are required to respond to at least one request for further information or clarification from the Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC). This study audited the request letters of a…

Global health emergencies often lead to a proliferation of health-related research and resultant data, which is shared across borders to help control the outbreak of disease and support decision-making regarding public health interventions. However, efforts to share data can be hindered by diverse international ethical and legal frameworks. The…

South African research ethics committees (RECs) faced significant challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research ethics committees needed to find a balance between careful consideration of scientific validity and ethical merit of protocols, and review with the urgency normally associated with public health emergency research. We aimed to…

It has been proposed that the urgency of having a vaccine as a response to SARS-CoV-2 is so great, given the potential health, economic and social benefits that we should override the established steps in the research development process. In this article I argue that whilst there are some opportunities to expedite the production of a vaccine, it…

Hundreds of clinical trials of potential treatments and vaccines for the "coronavirus 19 disease" (COVID-19) have been set up in record time. This is a remarkable reaction to the global pandemic, but the absence of a global coordination of clinical research efforts raises serious ethical concerns. Some COVID-19 patients might carry the…

COVID-19 is a very complex pandemic. It has affected individuals, different countries and regions of the world equally in some senses and differently in other senses. While sub-Saharan Africa has weathered a range of outbreaks of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, the manner in which the COVID-19 pandemic has evolved necessitates some…

There is too much that we do not know about COVID-19. The longer we take to find it out, the more lives will be lost. In this paper, we will defend a principle of "risk parity": if it is permissible to expose some members of society (e.g. health workers or the economically vulnerable) to a certain level of "ex ante" risk in…

Research represents an essential component of the response to infectious disease outbreaks and to other public health emergencies, whether they are localised, of international concern, or global. Research conducted in such contexts also comes with particular ethics challenges, the awareness of which has significantly grown following the Ebola…

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented, major challenges to the ethical conduct of research including challenges for the rapid and robust ethical review of biomedical research. The Indian Council of Medical Research's "National Guidelines for Ethics Committees Reviewing Biomedical and Health Research during COVID-19 Pandemic"…