Compassionate Patient Cases

According to Rid1, experimental interventions should not be distributed for compassionate use outside clinical trials. Infected health-care workers and imported cases are examples of compassionate use of these trials. One of the ethical principles of a research study is to have a fair selection of the study population. This will allow transparency in the selection criteria, will ensure scientific validity and will avoid prioritization of well-connected and well-off individuals. Infected health-care workers and imported cases who come to the United States for treatment are very often well-off since health-care workers might have special ties to the medical establishment, and imported cases have the means for traveling to the United States for treatment and might have special ties to be enrolled in an experimental treatment.
While it might be understandable to prioritize the presence of health-care workers in experimental treatments, since they putted themselves at risk while caring for patients and could continue looking out for patients after recovering, this breaks the scientific validity and fair selection of study population ethical principles for trials of experimental treatments. If imported cases or infected health-care workers become participants of experimental treatments, they should be randomized just as any participant in order to control for confounding. This means that these participants could be part of the experimental intervention with supportive care or the placebo with supportive care. Another ethical issue that is raised with imported cases and infected health-care workers in experimental treatments is that it could be considered that these individuals are being exploited because they are