Biomedical Regulations & Ethics

The United States has done the worst job at protecting the lives of its younger citizens from COVID — by far
While the elderly have been at the highest risk of becoming seriously ill due to COVID-19 infections, COVID-19 also affected ...

Here’s the skinny on the CRISPR patent saga between the Broad Institute and the CVC group
CRISPR was first reported by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier in 2012, as an outgrowth of their work on bacterial ...

CRISPR gene editing roils public discussion over ‘what it means to be disabled’
The gene-editing technology CRISPR promises enormous potential as a therapeutic for curing illnesses, including potentially devising new vaccines. But the ...

What could go wrong with vaccine passports? ACLU issues a warning
President Joe Biden's administration is working to establish a set of standards for people to prove they've been vaccinated against ...

Viewpoint: ‘War against the West’: Russia powers global vaccine rejectionist movement even as it inoculates its own citizens
Anyone active on social media is aware that there is a great deal of passionate but ill-founded opposition to vaccination, ...

Video: 31 states now considering legislation limiting trans athlete rights — Transgender pro cyclist and professor weighs in on sports inclusion
Why have 31 states introduced bills barring trans girls and women from playing girls' and women's school sports, despite having ...

‘Public health can supersede individual rights’: Government mandated vaccinations are not violations of personal liberty, courts determined a century ago
[A]s millions of Americans get vaccinated voluntarily against the coronavirus and society starts to reopen, questions loom about how far ...

Viewpoint: Human genetics has a racist history. Here is what needs to be done to clean up the mess
Combined with Mendelian determinism, which was wildly popular in the U.S. in the early 20th century, [eugenicist and father of ...

6 ‘rare and severe’ blood clot cases, all in women, out of 6.8 million doses: US pauses Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine to review the evidence
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US Food and Drug Administration are recommending that the United ...

Quickly-advancing human embryo research raises prickly ethical questions
Nature published two peer-reviewed papers about generating in vitro, with slightly different methods, “blastoids” or “human blastocyst-like structures”... Notably, none ...

Eastern European countries that opted for less expensive (and possibly less safe and effective) AstraZeneca vaccine see surge in cases as supplies lag
Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia and Slovakia, which declined part of their Pfizer allotments to wait for Astra doses, are among ...

Top disease control official in China admits its vaccines are less effective, then gets rebuked by central government
China has distributed hundreds of millions of doses of domestically made vaccines abroad and is relying on them for its ...

Inside the Biden Administration’s current plan to help shape ‘vaccine passports’ in the US
The [vaccine passport] initiative has emerged as an early test of the Biden administration, with officials working to coordinate across ...

Military resisting COVID vaccines: Nearly 40% of US Marines have rejected shots
As of [April 9], approximately 75,500 Marines have received vaccines, including fully vaccinated and partially vaccinated service men and women ...

Viewpoint: Do some of us carry ‘warrior genes’ that pry the door open to more violent behavior? Courts and scientists debate
Should a criminal defendant be allowed to argue that a specific gene rendered him unable to control his violent behavior? ...

Europe is the global epicenter for COVID mismanagement and vaccine distribution — and leadership is facing political repercussions
Europe’s third wave will cost thousands of lives and billions of euros. Summer vacationers, essential to the economies of Southern ...

Heartbeat abortions: Arizona legislature rejects bill that would have banned abortions as early as five weeks into pregnancy
[Arizona] Senate President Karen Fann told Capitol Media Services [April 6] she will not allow House Bill 2140 to come ...

Should ‘race’ be abandoned as surrogate for population differences in medical research?
Race was originally introduced in US medical curricula in 1790 by Benjamin Rush, who asserted that blackness was a particular ...
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56% of antibiotic treatments found inappropriate in hospital study
[A] study, led by researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and published [March 18] in JAMA ...

Exploring the ethics of vaccine and immunity passports
COVID-19 immunity licenses can be ethical in principle but in practice depend on 4 important questions related to both the ...

Viewpoint: Why the effort to find a ‘biological basis’ for being transgender is misguided and unhelpful
The search for a biological cause of transness—also known as “biological essentialism”—may be well-intentioned, but it is a dangerous path ...

Arizona House passes bill making it a felony to terminate a pregnancy if the fetus has a survivable genetic abnormality
The Republican-controlled Arizona House on [April 1] approved a sweeping abortion bill that makes it a felony for a doctor ...

Vaccine mandates come to colleges: Rutgers becomes one of the first schools to require COVID shots for in-person instruction this fall
Rutgers University is requiring students attending classes in person this fall to be vaccinated against Covid-19. It is among the ...

Facebook says it has banned vaccine disinformation — but it’s still far too easy to find
Facebook issued a broad prohibition in January 2020 on false claims or conspiracy theories about the coronavirus “that could cause ...

Who will win the battle over CRISPR-Cas 9 patent rights?
History is full of cases in which several researchers have found the same or similar inventions almost simultaneously. This is ...

Many long-term care workers resist COVID vaccinations. Can they be mandated?
It’s a question that many long-term care employers, from individual families to big national companies, are confronting as vaccines become ...