BBMRI-ERIC ELSI Services & Research Q&A on COVID-19 & ELSI

The world is facing an unprecedented public health challenge with the COVID-19 pandemic; this has necessitated numerous efforts being deployed by governments, health agencies and individual institutions – including in the biobanking community – to develop effective tests, toolkits, treatments and vaccines to stem its spread and help fight it. To achieve this goal, the collection, analysis and timely sharing of samples and related data becomes instrumental in collective global research efforts. Aligned to these efforts is the prevalence for automated data processing and digital technologies such as location data and contact tracing applications as part of the toolkits. In this respect, biobanks are important infrastructures for access to these samples and data. Besides availability, quality and technical infrastructures, also ethical, legal and societal issues (ELSI) are particularly crucial in this regard. Public health ethics, personal data protection, ethics of data sharing, protection of consent and vulnerability as well as compliance issues within international data sharing have gained urgency in COVID-19 research. Against this backdrop, BBMRI-ERIC ELSI Services & Research held a webinar that took a closer look at these issues. The webinar took place on April 24^th, 2020; the recording is available here.

This document not only answers the questions posed during the webinar but ventures into much detail on the topics raised as a result. It also showcases two examples from Germany (presented by Prof. Roland Jahns) and Italy (presented by Prof. Marialuisa Lavitrano), as well as a detailed commentary on contact-tracing-apps from a legal perspective (presented by Gauthier Chassang). The document thus lays the foundation for further discussion on ELSI and COVID-19 in the context of biobanking.