October 1, 2020

Could the Common Cold Help Stop Covid-19? We Need to Know--Now

In an essay published this week in Scientific American, Hastings Center research scholar Carolyn P. Neuhaus and Kevin Esvelt, of MIT, call for immediate and intensive research into the possibility that exposure to one of the coronaviruses that causes the common cold could decrease the severity of Covid-19, and could be leveraged to expand what’s been called “pre-existing” immunity to the disease by deliberate transmission of common cold coronaviruses. Read the Scientific American essay. Could deliberately spreading the common cold help end the pandemic? Might the common cold provide “herd immunity” to Covid-19? Recognizing that their proposal raises many questions, Neuhaus and Esvelt addressed some of them in a Hastings Bioethics Forum post. Read their post.

Equitably Sharing the Benefits and Burdens of Research: Covid-19 Raises the Stakes

One of the central principles of research ethics is that the benefits and burdens of research with human participants should be equitably distributed. This principle has important implications for questions about where research will be conducted, how participants will be recruited, what questions will be investigated, and who will control the distribution of any innovations that result. In the rush to initiate clinical trials of treatments and vaccines for Covid‐19, careful attention to these questions is particularly important. If clinical trials are not designed with equity considerations consciously in mind, the response to the pandemic may exacerbate disparities in health status between population groups. An article in Ethics & Human Research calls for an international governance system to oversee access to Covid‐19 vaccines and treatments. Read the article for free. Other articles in the current issue concern ethical oversight of big data in biomedical research and “person-oriented” research ethics to address the needs of participants on the autism spectrum. See the table of contents and read the abstracts.

In the Media: Securing the Privacy of Big Data in Autism Research

Many families who are enthusiastic about participating in autism research—or having their children do so—also fear that their personal health information could leak out online or get into the wrong hands, exposing them to stigma or discrimination. U.S. federal data-privacy laws such as the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) offer some protection, but they may not go far enough. “There are a number of people who have been talking about [whether] we really need to look at GINA in the context of big data and the merging of these databases,” said Hastings Center research scholar Karen J. Maschke, in an interview in Spectrum. Read the article.

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