Doug Makay was interviewed by Logan Ward for the February 23rd issue of UNC’s The Well on “The Pros and Cons of Universal Basic Income.” The idea of governments giving residents no-strings-attached cash payments is picking up steam, due in part to the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Last June, Mayor Michael Tubbs of … Read more

The Ethics of Public Policy Research, Conversations about Research Ethics (CARE) Panel, Center for Ethics and Human Values, The Ohio State University, January 22, 2021

Ethical Challenges in the Development and Distribution of a COVID-19 Vaccine. Carolina Public Humanities, Fayetteville Technical Community College December 4, 2020

Hospital systems commonly face the challenge of determining just ways to allocate scarce drugs during national shortages. There is no standardised approach of how this should be instituted, but principles of distributive justice are commonly used so that patients who are most likely to benefit from the drug receive it. As a result, clinical indications, … Read more

This chapter provides a critical overview and interpretation of fair subject selection in clinical and social scientific research. It first provides an analytical framework for thinking about the problem of fair subject selection. It then argues that fair subject selection is best understood as a set of four subprinciples, each with normative force and each … Read more

Governments are increasingly using randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate policy interventions.1 RCTs are often understood to provide the highest quality evidence regarding the causal efficacy of an intervention.2 By randomly assigning participants to intervention and control groups, for example, investigators can minimize selection bias—i.e., systematic differences between those subject and not subject to the … Read more

Controlled human infection (CHI) studies involve the deliberate exposure of healthy research participants to infectious agents to study early disease processes and evaluate interventions under controlled conditions with high efficiency. Although CHI studies expose participants to the risk of infection, they are designed to offer investigators unique advantages for studying the pathogenesis of infectious diseases … Read more

The increasing pace and international diffusion of developments in human genome editing research have prompted ongoing efforts to develop responsible governance for such research. One point of broad agreement across these efforts is that human genome editing research should prioritize medical applications over attempts to enhance human traits because of the moral concerns the latter … Read more

Development of an effective vaccine is the clearest path to controlling the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. To accelerate vaccine development, some researchers are pursuing, and thousands of people have expressed interest in participating in, controlled human infection studies (CHIs) with severe acute respiratory syndrome–coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) (1, 2). In CHIs, a small number of … Read more

Although the principle of fair subject selection is a widely recognized requirement of ethical clinical research, it often yields conflicting imperatives, thus raising major ethical dilemmas regarding participant selection. In this paper, we diagnose the source of this problem, arguing that the principle of fair subject selection is best understood as a bundle of four … Read more