The justice of pandemic biomedical research priorities: Ethical Framework

At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a series of
both practical and policy decisions led to the large-scale
pausing of biomedical research in the UK. This document
outlines a timeline of key events and some of their
main consequences. It uses this to highlight key ethical
considerations that should have been incorporated into
policy and decision-making processes about pausing such
research. I suggest that a justice-based framework is the
best approach to framing and determining questions of
biomedical research prioritisation, both contemporaneously
and in hindsight, and show how the ethical considerations
of the pandemic response of the biomedical research sector
can be viewed against such framing