Rebalancing commercial and public interests in prioritizing biomedical, social and environmental aspects of health through defining and managing conflicts of interest.

Biomedical research is intended to benefit human beings and their health. Toward that end, scientific norms involve examining and criticizing the work of others and prioritizing questions that should be studied. Yet, in areas of health research where industry is active, it has often utilized well-honed strategies aimed at evading scientific standards and at dominating the research agenda, largely through its financial support and lack of transparency of its research practices. These tactics have now been documented to uniformly support industry products. Commercial entities are aided in this pursuit by public policy that has significantly embedded commercial interests and agendas into federal research funding and infrastructure. Therefore, to understand the resulting landscape and its effect on priority in health research agendas, traditional definitions of individual conflicts of interest (COI) and the less well developed institutional COI must be supplemented by a new construct of structural COI, largely operating as intellectual monopolies, in support of industry. These arrangements often result in financial and reputational resources that assure dominance of commercial priorities in research agendas, crowding out any other interests and ignoring justified returns to the public from investment of its tax dollars. There is no sustained attention to mechanisms by which public interests can be heard, normative issues raised, and then balanced with commercial interests which are transparently reported. Focus on research supporting approval of commercial products ignores social and environmental determinants of health. Commercial bias can invalidate regulatory research protections through obscuring valid risk-benefit ratios considered by IRBs.

Law and the Pandemic: The Lessons of the Crisis.

The COVID-19 pandemic is exerting pressure on law and order, testing the strength of their basic elements and subsystems. It is transforming positive law and system-forming processes in the legal sphere, which ensure the functioning of the legal organization of society developed in the prepandemic period. The pandemic affects it indirectly, having a transformative effect on the mechanisms for exercising public power, law formation, and law implementation, including law enforcement. During the pandemic, human rights, which were not previously positioned in this capacity, have acquired absolute importance. Among them is the right to health protection and proper medical care. Along with this, special legal regimes and many legal institutions of both public and private law have been modernized, and new legal models and practices have been tested that are suitable not only for regulating social relations in extraordinary conditions but also for creating law and order in postpandemic society. Some of them have already been implemented into ordinary legislation. The doctrine recorded a growing multifunctionality of some legal means, as well as the emergence of new legal phenomena, in particular, antipandemic legislation. According to the authors of this article, to respond effectively to emergency situations, it is necessary to expand the existing variable scenarios of legal regulation and create appropriate regulatory templates, algorithms, and procedures for the activities of public authorities, as well as the scopes of their competence in the event of such situations. For Russian law and order, it is relevant in this context to systematize the legal basis of special legal regimes designed for crisis situations with account for the correction made, as well as to develop scientific criteria for differentiating the corresponding regimes.

Public opinion as a means of managing social processes.

The relevance of the study is expressed by the improvement and development of tools for managing social processes and public procedures. There are a large number of concepts and theories that explain certain aspects of public opinion: exposure to influence, an impact on people's actions, and its contradictory nature. The main forming factors of individual behavior are the stereotypes and values that are developed within society. In moments of social instability, the problem of governance and expression of public opinion progresses. The purpose of the study is to consider public opinion similarly and to search for patterns of its functioning. At present, there is a lack of an expressly unified model that allows characterizing all the laws of existence and its phenomena. Public opinion is understudied, despite the large volumes of theoretical research. This is explained by the predominance of psychological and sociological scientific concepts in the analysis of public opinion. This study is based on specific methods of conducting various sociological monitoring and developments in the field of methodology. Modern humanitarian knowledge misses certain problems related to the role of public opinion in the context of social processes. The practical significance of this study lies in the investigation and distribution of approaches to the study of public opinion as a means of managing social processes.

Participated without consent: Mandatory authorization of government database for secondary use.

Compared with data that is initially collected for research purposes, the mandatory authorization of a government database for secondary use deserves greater scrutiny because it consists of information that is collected initially for administrative purposes. Using the case of Taiwan's National Health Insurance (NHI) Database as an example, this paper analyzes the ethical issues that emerge when the research participants are "participated" in studies without their consent, according to the current policy. The proponents of secondary use for research purposes maintain that the authorized use of the NHI Database is necessary for public interests, while the opponents argue that the potential lack of democratic accountability and the infringement on people's rights to privacy and information autonomy is unwarranted. Drawing on the solidarity-based approach, this paper proposes a temporal solution as a possible reform direction for better ethical justification of the secondary use of the NHI Database.

On Ethical Problems in Preventing and Curing Emergency Infectious Diseases from the Event of A H1N1 Influenza / 中国医学伦理学

Preventing and curing emergency infectious diseases,such as A H1N1 influenza,is a public health practice,and its relevant ethical problems are pubic health ethical problems,mainly manifesting as the conflicts between individual interests and public interests,individual freedom and quarantine,individual privacy right and releasing partial medical information,and choosing one's own doctors and compulsory treatment.The core of the issue is that individual interests should be submitted to the public interests,and at the same time government and society should respect individual's freedom,privacy and right of health.

On Privacy Protection of Patients with A H1N1 Influenza / 中国医学伦理学

Protection for privacy is the guarantee for sustaining personal dignity and individual liberty.Protection for patients' privacy has a long history and is of great realistic significance.However,patients with A H1N1 Influenza are facing the risk of exposing privacy in current circumstances.This paper argues that the privacy protection for this particular population is beneficial both for social and public interests,and also can be justified from an ethical perspective.