Webinar: 11th  January 2021

How can people be provided with good quality medicines at a time of supply chain crisis? How and why do doctors prescribe off-label drugs? How do patients manage precarity in daily contexts that are imagined stable? How do knowledge-producing organisations reduce data complexity for the sake of clarity? All these questions are united by a leitmotif of uncertainty unfolding between people and institutions in increasingly complex environments, often marked by precarity, power asymmetry and structural violence.

This webinar was organised by GLIDE Fellows:

• Arsenii Alenichev, Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities | Ethox Centre | GLIDE
• Athmeya Jayaram, Berman Institute for Bioethics | GLIDE
• Chelsea Modlin, Berman Institute for Bioethics | GLIDE
• Halina Suwalowska, Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities | Ethox Centre | GLIDE

 Our Speakers discussed a range of themes and questions:

• Resolving and preserving uncertainty in science    Nicole C. Nelson, Associate Professor, Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison

• Reducing the uncertain knowledge to misconceptions – alienating people and their lifeworlds    Arsenii Alenichev, Postdoctoral Fellow in in Global Health Bioethics, Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities | Ethox Centre

• The Ethical Implications of Uncertainty for Clinical Practice: The Case of Covid-19 and the Understanding of Evidence    Beatriz Thome, Affiliated Physician, Preventive Medicine Department, Federal University of São Paulo |  Gail Geller, Professor in the School of Medicine (SOM) and the Berman Institute of Bioethics, Johns Hopkins University. Director of Education Initiatives at the Berman Institute and Co-Director of the “Culture of Medicine” in undergraduate medical education at the SOM

• Minimally Invasive Autopsy – navigating uncertainties of death    Halina Suwalowska, Postdoctoral Fellow in in Global Health Bioethics | WHO Epidemic Ethics Fellow, Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities | Ethox Centre

• Where Evidence Fails: Caring for Cancer without Certainty in Haiti    Rebecca Henderson, MD/PhD candidate, College of Medicine, University of Florida, USA

• Perspectives on sourcing medical products of uncertain quality   Kate Enright, Wellcome Trust DPhil Student (Population Health), Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities | Ethox Centre, University of Oxford, UK  | Resources Elusive quality: the challenges and ethical dilemmas faced by international non-governmental organisations in sourcing quality assured medical products ; Podcast series: ‘Exploring the genuine fake’

Photo by Hush Naidoo Jade on Unsplash