Research Ethics during a Pandemic: A Call for Normative and Empirical Analysis

The current COVID-19 pandemic is challenging many assumptions and previously accepted norms in medicine, medical research and society in general. Doctors, hospitals and local governments, for example, have struggled to determine how to distribute scarce resources to patients and healthcare professionals. With the development of new therapies, these same groups will need to rationalise the distribution of the limited supply of these drugs. Given these challenges, much of the ethical work during this pandemic has appropriately focused on clinical medicine and public health dilemmas. However, we argue that ethicists and policy makers have focused too little on the ethics of COVID-19 research during this pandemic. Despite the negative impact of the current crisis, future crises could be much worse.