Abstract
AbstractEven under the pressure of a worldwide pandemic, urgent international medical research must be ethically planned and conducted, particularly in lower-income countries, to avoid the appearance or the reality of exploitation. Over the past few decades, a number of international research ethic codes have been developed to protect the rights of individual research participants—sometimes even to the point of guaranteeing them access to the fruits of the research years after the trial in which they took part has ended. Among these are the Declaration of Helsinki, the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, and the frequently updated ethics guidelines by the Council for International Organizations of Medical Sciences (CIOMS). However, these codes, and often the research institutions that comply with them, miss a crucial point. They do not come to grips with the broader societal context in which emergency research on emerging or re-emerging infectious diseases is carried out. The Ebola outbreak in 2014–2016 and the COVID-19 pandemic that exploded in 2020 revealed deep disparities between wealthy and lower-income countries in health, medical care, and the social and economic conditions that lay at the heart of their impoverishment. World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared that the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has hit the poorest countries in the world hardest and “instead of solidarity, the pandemic has been marred by inequity.” The international health, research, and ethics communities—and their home countries—must work together to correct these inequities.
Publisher
Springer International Publishing