While we suggest that rational deliberation [21] must occur in order to ensure that the ethical tensions are acknowledged and addressed, we do not suggest that this set of considerations is exhaustive or decisive.

The empirical context is directly relevant to bioethical deliberation, as there may be morally relevant facts that can inform how to weigh these considerations. Having said this, we agree with Verweij and Dawson that despite the fact that decisions are taken within a specific regulatory context in which there are empirical facts that need to be taken into account, “some agreement can be reached about which general norms should guide”, even when agreement about the interpretation selleck of the ethical considerations remains contested [11]. We thus propose these ethical considerations as a starting place for ethical reflection and as a means to fostering deliberation, not closing down discussion. The utility of these considerations will require evaluation, as the conceptual nature of this research will require further refinement through empirical research and input from a community of scholars and regulators and the public [3]. It is hoped that these considerations will encourage regulators and researchers charged with the post-market monitoring of vaccines to consider the explicit articulation

of values in the decision-making and research-shaping process in this context. This research was funded Rutecarpine by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Catalyst Award no. 264153 from the Drug Safety and Effectiveness Network. Conflict of interest statement We declare that we BTK inhibitor in vivo have no conflicts of interest,

and that the funder (Canadian Institutes of Health Research) had no say in the design, interpretation or conclusions of this research. “
“Global eradication of disease has fired the imagination since the introduction of vaccination, a possibility that Jefferson brilliantly expressed in his letter to Jenner: ‘Medicine has never before produced any single improvement of such utility… Future nations will know by history only that the loathsome smallpox has existed and by you has been extirpated’ [1]. Whilst it was over 170 years before Jefferson’s dream was realised, smallpox was indeed globally eradicated by the end of the 1970s, and remains an iconic achievement of the twentieth century. In general, to eradicate a disease is to reduce to zero the incidence of the disease through deliberate efforts [2]. To eradicate a disease globally is to remove the disease threat from the whole world, permanently: in a recent consensus definition, “the worldwide absence of a specific disease agent in nature as a result of deliberate control efforts that may be discontinued where the agent is judged no longer to present a significant risk from extrinsic sources (e.g. smallpox)” [3]. This paper is concerned with the ethics of global disease eradication.