The Ethics of Developing New Treatments: A Case Study of the West African Ebola Outbreak and the Use of Randomized Control Trials

11 pagesThe 2014-2015 Ebola epidemic was the most devastating Ebola outbreak in history, killing over 10,000 people. During the outbreak, the WHO led efforts to design the best method to test the potential treatments quickly. Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) were proposed as the best method, although many experts opposed their use, deeming them inappropriate in the context of an epidemic. Despite the long debate, RCTs were used to test the available treatments. This paper presents arguments both supporting and opposing RCTs, and analyzes a few example RCTs conducted to answer the following question: “were RCTs effective at helping researchers fight the epidemic?” This paper argues that RCTs were not the best approach for two reasons: the principle of equipoise requires that patients are provided available treatments; if RCTs were to be used, they should have begun earlier to ensure the validity of the findings