With its Task Force on Ethics, the IFCC creates a collective voice for ethical issues in Laboratory Medicine and raises awareness of ethics-related issues. The COVID 19 pandemic tests our professional responsibility and demands that we do not simply perform tests and use technology uncritically.

In this webinar we will first talk about the causes of the profoundly reduced life expectancy Australia’s remote-dwelling Aborigines and describe demands upon the medical practitioner that are so fundamental that they are rarely encountered in "urban" medicine. Then we will concentrate on how the Covid-19 pandemic is changing the research and society, focusing on the use of remnant clinical samples for research, often exempted from informed consent and the idea of collaboration with scientific research as a moral duty. Finally, as this pandemic has emphasized many long-standing inequities in communities we will highlight the impact of long-standing medical conditions, challenges of testing and contact tracing, mistrust of medical institutions and vaccines.

Is this the time to propose a paradigm shift in health care and research ethics?