November 27, 2018 12:00 PM
Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East C (2036)
Harvard Law School, 1585 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, MA
Video and Podcast of the event (courtesy of Berkman Klein Center).
Infectious disease emergencies are opportunities to test the efficacy of newly developed interventions—for example, drugs, vaccines, and treatment regimens. Yet they raise many intertwined challenges around politics, logistics, ethics, and study design. It is essential to advance the discussion of how such products can and should be tested while remaining consistent with the efforts of CEPI, WHO, and others who encourage development and testing of candidate vaccines in advance of emergencies. This can help disentangle ethical from political and logistical concerns, reduce the time pressure to make a decision, and encourage rational deliberation by future stakeholders who at the time of deliberation do not know what role (which product, which field site) they may be supporting in an actual emergency.
This lunch talk, moderated by Ashveena Gajeelee from Global Access in Action, will describe Professor Lipsitch’s work on computer simulation of vaccine trials during epidemics to assess options for trial design, as well as some of his recent work on the ethics of trials in emergencies. The aim is to stimulate discussion on the intersection of these two topics to help disentangle ethical from political and logistical concerns, as well as to reduce the time pressure to make a decision and encourage rational deliberation by future stakeholders.
Video and Podcast of the event (courtesy of Berkman Klein Center).
About the Speaker
Marc Lipsitch is Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is an author of more than 250 peer-reviewed publications on antimicrobial resistance, epidemiologic methods, mathematical modeling of infectious disease transmission, pathogen population genomics, and immunoepidemiology of Streptococcus pneumoniae. Recently he has had a growing interest in the use of transmission-dynamic simulations to improve the design of randomized and observational studies of infectious disease interventions. He has also begun to contribute to topics in bioethics related to infectious diseases and clinical trials in emergencies.
The Digital Health @ Harvard series features speakers from Harvard as well as collaborators and colleagues from other institutions who research the intersection between health and digital technology. The series is co-sponsored by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School. The goal of the series is to discuss ongoing research in this research area, share new developments, identify opportunities for collaboration, and explore the digital health ecosystem more generally.