Comment

News of two new outbreaks of Ebola virus disease in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Republic of Guinea, on the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, signals the need for a change of direction in vaccination strategies in the area.

Climate change can both facilitate zoonotic spillovers and have an effect on transmission chains. These effects, alongside human behavior and awareness, need to be integrated in pandemic forecasting models.

The COVID-19 pandemic has reasserted the central role of effective diagnostics in the response to outbreaks. But a lack of coordination still hampers widespread access to these critical tools. A diagnostics agenda for global health is urgently needed for the promotion of diagnostics as a global good and to ensure their delivery.

In a health emergency, clear, two-way communication between researchers and a broad spectrum of stakeholders is essential to establishing trust—a prerequisite for meaningful uptake of new treatments and vaccines.

An increasing amount of publications are recognizing that a person’s risk of diabetes and diabetes outcomes are influenced largely by social determinants of health. This renewed understanding of disease should influence health provision and diabetes research, but will it?

Unexpected direct and indirect risks of participating in clinical trials have emerged during COVID-19 that investigators and institutional review boards may not be sure how to investigate. How should existing guidance and ethical frameworks for clinical trials be applied in a pandemic setting?

Shared medical appointments, whereby patients with similar medical conditions consult their medical practitioner together, alleviate pressure on the health system and provide an instant support network for the patient. Why not make them virtual?

We argue that deliberative decision making that is inclusive, transparent and accountable can contribute to more trustworthy and legitimate decisions on difficult ethical questions and political trade-offs during the pandemic and beyond.

The limitations of using race in biomedicine are important to recognize because race is often afforded more biological value than can be scientifically justified — and less social value than it commands.

The Human Cell Atlas has been undergoing a massive effort to support global scientific equity. The co-leaders of its Equity Working Group share some lessons learned in the process.

With only a limited number of clinical trials of artificial intelligence in medicine thus far, the first guidelines for protocols and reporting arrive at an opportune time. Better protocol design, along with consistent and complete data presentation, will greatly facilitate interpretation and validation of these trials, and will help the field to move forward.

Familiar concepts from research ethics can guide the meaningful and rigorous translation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools into clinical practice.

Here we present the MI-CLAIM checklist, a tool intended to improve transparent reporting of AI algorithms in medicine.

Many widely used health algorithms have been shown to encode and reinforce racial health inequities, prioritizing the needs of white patients over those of patients of color. Because automated systems are becoming so crucial to access to health, researchers in the field of artificial intelligence must become actively anti-racist. Here we list some concrete steps to enable anti-racist practices in medical research and practice.

Racism is a social determinant of health and negatively affects health outcomes. This Comment describes steps to take toward achieving equity and racial justice in medical training and addressing racism in clinical settings.

In the current COVID-19 pandemic, many researchers are applying to research ethics committees for deferred-consent procedures for protocols that aim either to test treatments or to obtain tissue or samples from research participants. However, the deferred-consent procedure has not been developed for pandemics. In this Comment, we interpret existing guidance documents and argue when and under which conditions deferred consent can be considered ethically acceptable in a pandemic.

Given the current trends in incidence and underlying healthcare systems vulnerabilities, Africa could become the next epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the pandemic transitions to more widespread community transmission, how can the lessons learned thus far be consolidated to effectively curb the spread of COVID-19 while minimizing social disruption and negative humanitarian and economic consequences?

Many actors in the response to COVID-19 are holding out for a vaccine to be developed. But in the meantime, tried and tested public-health measures for controlling outbreaks can be implemented. A scorecard can be used to assess governments’ responses to the outbreak.

Africa is said to be the next possible hotspot for COVID-19. However, we believe this is still preventable.

COVID-19 has disrupted scientific productivity in unquantifiable ways. Unquestionably, the biggest disruption has been felt by junior faculty. However, these bright young minds do not have to be sacrificed.