Abstract
This special issue of Research Ethics comprises papers related to research ethics and research integrity during global crises, edited by Dr Kate Chatfield and Dr Hazel Partington. Most of the submissions focus on the challenges of conducting research during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is not the first issue to have such a focus, nor is it likely to be the last. There is motivation and desire for collective forgetting; our memories are fuzzy and months and years seem to have disappeared. This seems a logical response—who wants to dwell on trauma and uncertainty? However we also know that infectious disease emergencies have and will happen again. Consider, for example, that in early August 2024, the World Health Organization again declared mpox viral disease as a public health emergency of international concern. We cannot use the excuse of novel pandemics being “unprecedented” to fail to plan for future emergencies, and we have a moral and practical responsibility to record the detail of and learn from what happened with COVID and the collective response to it.
Each of the papers in this issue grapples with how dynamic crisis contexts shaped a slippery new normal. These led to changed pressures, changed expectations, changed practices, and constantly shifting calculus about how risks and benefits ought to be assessed. In some cases, pressures to generate benefits by way of developing vaccines and treatments as quickly as possible led to an appetite for increased risk via the relaxing of optimal ethical and methodological standards. Weijer focuses on two such examples; the proposals to run human-challenge trials in the search for COVID vaccine candidates, and the rise of treatment trials that had features associated with a high risk of bias, such as being unblinded (Weijer, 2024). Both involved disrupting accepted standards, justified by a desire for haste, and neither were ultimately successful in generating hoped-for benefits. Similarly, Seedall and Tambornino reflect on pressures faced by researchers to act quickly under conditions of uncertain and changeable risk-benefit analyses leading to “a storm of impediments to ethically sound and high quality research” (Seedall and Tambornino, 2024). In contrast, a case study in this issue about the development of the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine demonstrates that it is possible to work very quickly—indeed at “lightspeed”—while adhering to established research and clinical norms (Leisinger and Schroeder, 2024).
Other papers in this issue reflect on new or differently inflected ethical considerations, particularly concerning risk, that disrupted research during the acute phase(s) of the COVID-19 pandemic. These include recruiting participants for clinical trials (Arnold et al., 2024) where unanticipated factors made for complex decisions and the development of a proposal for improved enrolment in trials. Law and Smith also use shortcomings in COVID-19 trial design, and a wider crisis of trial design, to make suggestions for how to reduce waste and risks to participants associated with redundancy inherent in uninformative trials (Law and Smith, 2024).
It can be tempting, with the benefit of forgetting, to condemn some of the decisions that were made with the best of intentions in 2020–21. We hope that these papers contribute to continued reflection that improves research ethics practice not just in times of crisis but also more broadly.
And in other news:
We’re delighted to introduce ourselves as the incoming co-Editors in Chief of Research Ethics. We are very fortunate to have inherited a wonderfully professional, thoughtful and diverse journal from Dr Edward Dove and Dr Kate Chatfield and are committed to and excited about keeping up their good work. Briefly, we are empirical ethics researchers based in Australia with different but overlapping areas of expertise. We are involved in the nuts and bolts of research ethics via assessment and oversight committees, and each bring a specific topic focus: clinical trials, emergency ethics, and new technologies. We are also very happy to welcome some new Associate Editors to the fold. Joining our excellent team (Dove, 2024) and adding to multi-disciplinary expertise are Robert James Boyles (De La Salle University Manila, Philippines), Natalia Hanley (University of Wollongong, Australia), Emilia Niemiec (University of Copenhagen, Denmark), and Henry Silverman (University Of Maryland, United States). We thank them for their important work, and we thank you for reading and contributing.