Ethics

This Viewpoint describes transparency practices that could help physicians build trust with patients and model professionalism for students and trainees: clear and consistent disclosure of financial relationships, conflicts of interest, credentials, disciplinary actions, performance metrics, and personal information or experiences oriented toward improving patient outcomes.

This Viewpoint proposes that prioritizing all placebo-group participants in coronavirus vaccine trials as vaccine first receivers could perpetuate health inequities and compromise the chance to learn from their participation, proposing instead to limit prioritization to placebo participants who would be prioritized for vaccination anyway under NASEM or ACIP frameworks.

This Viewpoint discusses the ethics of including a placebo arm in randomized trials of coronavirus vaccines once authorized vaccines have become widely available, and proposes use of adaptive platform trial designs as an optimal approach to nimbly and ethically compare future investigational COVID-19 vaccines with proven effective ones.

This Viewpoint discusses questions about clinical indication, supply, distribution, and cost and coverage that will need to be resolved if monoclonal antibodies are be granted Emergency Use Authorization or licensure and become available as treatment for COVID-19.

This Viewpoint discusses the modern history of US presidential disability and efforts to balance the chief executive’s confidentiality with the public’s right to know, and calls for clearer guidelines from trusted physician organizations to inform bipartisan cabinet and congressional assessments of physical and psychiatric fitness to hold office.

This Viewpoint considers how COVID-19 vaccines can be distributed strategically, ethically, and legally given conflicts between consensus public health recommendations to prioritize allocation to disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities and laws discouraging explicit consideration of race in policy decisions.

This Viewpoint summarizes the principles guiding coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine recommendations made by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), a nongovernment advisory standing committee that counsels the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on US population vaccine use, emphasizing that any final recommendations await phase 3 safety and efficacy data from ongoing trials.

In this narrative medicine essay, a Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) clinician uses the resignation of BWH's president from Moderna's board of directors after a stock sale reportedly paying her millions to question why leaders of academic medical centers are allowed to develop lucrative relationships with industry that prioritize mutual profits over patient well-being and public health.

This study uses Medicare Open Payments data to characterize trends in the prevalence and value of physicians’ interactions with industry overall and by specialty between January 2014 and December 2018 after implementation of the federal Open Payments transparency program in 2013.