Pregnant people are often excluded from research without clear justification, even when there is little harm to the fetus in minimal‐risk research. In this issue of Ethics & Human Research, ob/gyn Amina White and colleagues survey current and former institutional review board personnel to find out their interpretations of “minimal risk” to identify factors that might influence IRB decisions to approve research with those who are pregnant. Also in this issue, an ethics review in the Covid‐19 era; designs for an observational toxicology study involving intoxicated patients; and an essay on making metrics meaningful in human research protection programs.

What The Study Did: This survey study found that COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy decreased between late 2020 and early 2021, with nearly one-third of survey participants who were initially hesitant being vaccinated at follow-up and more than one-third transitioning from vaccine hesitant into vaccine willing.

What The Study Did: Researchers compared deaths among individuals slightly younger and older than 65 years to examine the relationship between access to health insurance coverage (versus no insurance) and COVID-19 mortality.

The University of Kent’s School of Biosciences and the Institute of Medical Virology at Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, have identified a protein that may critically contribute to severe forms of COVID-19.

Women with general practitioner (GP) recorded exposure to domestic abuse or violence were at an increased risk of contracting COVID-19 during the first two waves of the pandemic in the UK, finds a new study led by the University of Birmingham.

A treatment combining two antibodies (casirivimab and imdevimab) is recommended for two specific groups of patients with covid-19 by a WHO Guideline Development Group (GDG) panel of international experts and patients in The BMJ today.

Nearly half of Black parents (48 percent) were hesitant about the COVID-19 vaccine for their child, compared to 33 percent of Latinx parents and 26 percent of white parents, according to survey results from Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago.

Twist Bioscience reported that its internally-discovered antibody candidate TB202-3 (CoVIC-094), demonstrated potent binding to diverse SARS-CoV-2 variant mutations, including strains with the E484K, N501Y, D614G, Y453F and K417N mutations in pseudovirus assays, indicating this therapeutic antibody may be effective in treating many strains of COVID-19. The Coronavirus Immunotherapy Consortium (CoVIC), an academic-industry, non-profit collaborative research effort, conducted the blinded analysis.

What The Study Did: The results of this analysis of online food ordering and delivery in Singapore suggest unhealthier eating habits during the COVID-19 lockdown, changes that persisted after lockdown measures were removed.