2020 has been a crazy year for the entire world but the best thing about it for me has been the Virtual Exploration in Cancer Research at the Fred Hutch. The highlight of this entire experience was the lesson in bioethics. Bioethics is the ethics of medical research and procedures. Ethics determines what a person should do and it helps people decide how to behave and treat one another. I learned that ethics can be different for every person based on our culture and upbringing. This is known as ethical relativism which says that there is no superior style of thinking because everyone has a different analysis of ethics. There is also ethics absolutism which is that there are moral principles that are the same for every case. Science uses both of these concepts relying on evidence and reasoning for each individual case. Ethics is used to determine how science should be conducted, how the discoveries should be used and what type of science should be researched. We learned about the different guidelines to think about including respect, maximizing benefits, minimizing harms, justice, and critical perspectives. We also learned about the different clinical studies on marginalized populations and the ethics of these trials. I chose this as my highlight because I believe that science is important but how we discover science is just as important.
Ethics is needed in moral dilemmas based on response, reasoning and responsibility. A big moral dilemma facing our entire world is the Coronavirus Pandemic and how the vaccine will be distributed. John Hopkins bioethicist Ruth Faden is working on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Covid-19 Vaccines Working Group spoke about this in an article. The private sector is driving the vaccine development process. Private industrial developers can make vaccines at low and affordable prices for all countries. Wealthy countries will get the vaccines first and they have to decide how much of the vaccine they can export to other countries. This creates vaccine nationalism which is the idea that a country will distribute the vaccine to their residents before other countries. This could cause a spike in cases of low and middle income countries which creates an ethical dilemma. The WHO is participating in a collaboration with global health experts to oversee the development and accessibility of the vaccine. The next question is who will get the vaccine first?This vaccine will take a long time to spread and it won’t be a quick transition.
Our group’s vaccine distribution scenario
Dr. Joshua Schiffer and Dr. Bryan Mayer are studying the similarities between Sars-Cov-2 and influenza and the super-spreading of Covid-19. How does Sars-Cov-2 spread in populations? This can help us understand Covid-19 and how to prevent the spread of the disease. This can also convince others to wear masks because of how Covid-19 spreads airborne. Dr. Joshua Schiffer is an Associate Professor in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at the Hutch. He is currently working on an HIV cure, Tissue Resident T Cells, and Viral Infections in Cancer Patients. His research interest is describing the quantitative and dynamical features of human pathogens and immune responses. Dr. Bryan Mayer is a Staff Scientist in the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Division at Fred Hutch. His research interests include analysis of immune response to vaccine candidates and trial design for vaccine pilot studies.
This has been an amazing experience where I met a diverse group of people in this difficult time. Can’t wait for when this is over and we can go to the Fred Hutch Lab. Go the Blues.
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