Equity must be baked into randomized controlled trials – Nature (Editorial | June 2022)
The response to the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated how priority research can transform lives and treatments. Helicopter research and ethics dumping involves a richer country testing new treatments in a poorer country with fewer ethical standards and regulations. Where it is effectively easier and cheaper to expose the local people to experimental treatments than it would be to do work in their own country. Even worse, the final cost of the treatment might make it unlikely that people in the test country will be able to access the treatment once it is available as a commercial medicine. Such practice is disgusting and should not be tolerated. Funding bodies, journals, learned societies and institutions can play a key role in urging researchers away from such practice.