Gates Package — page 955

The New York Times put it.8 But there was a catch: They weren't sure they could tell anyone what they knew. The patient at the hospital who had given the sample didn't know that it had been used in a research trial. Although it was well within standard practice to test the patient's sample for another disease such as COVID, revealing the results of that test to anyone--even to the patient, much less to public health officials--was another matter. It would be a violation of the flu study's research protocols. Also, their COVID test had been approved for use in research studies, but not medical settings, in which the results are given to patients. Although the study team had been talking to government regulators for weeks, there was no way to get their test authorized for medical use. The rules for okaying COVID tests developed by anyone other than the CDC had not even been written yet. It was a difficult dilemma. On the one hand, revealing the results would violate the standards under which they were operating as ethical researchers and could run afoul of government rules. On the other hand, how could the team withhold test results from someone carrying a virus that was causing a pandemic? Or from public health officials who needed to know that COVID was spreading in the state, and had almost certainly infected hundreds more people than they realized? One member of the group clarified the debate with a simple question: "What would a reasonable person do?" When he put it like that, the answer seemed obvious. A reasonable person would protect the individual and the community by revealing the results. So they did. The news made a splash. "Coronavirus May Have Spread in U.S. for Weeks, Gene Sequencing Suggests," as one headline in The New York Times put it.8