Led by the World Health Organization and supported by key partners including the Fogarty International Center, the Global Forum on Bioethics in Research, the Global Health Network, the Global Network of WHO Collaborating Centres and Wellcome, the Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Ethics Network (PHEPREN) is a global community of bioethicists building on pre-existing expertise and resources to provide real-time, trusted, contextual support to communities, policy makers, researchers, and responders in relation to the ethical issues arising out of global health emergencies, with a current focus on the COVID-19 pandemic.

Recognising the need for coordinated and contextual ethics support in decision making in health emergencies, WHO created PHEPREN with the following aims in mind:

• To build ethics capacity in country, to support both preparedness and response
• Help coordinate and support real-time, contextual ethical decision-making in public health emergencies
• To conduct empirical and normative research, so that we are:
• better prepared for future outbreaks
• addressing outstanding ethical issues from past outbreaks
• To build fair, collaborative partnerships, so that research can be both generated by and conducted by ethicists in low and middle-income settings, with a view to growing capacity for the future.
• To support the work of the WHO R&D Blueprint
• To ensure that the outputs of the network are coordinated, flexible, globally distributed and positioned to inform and be incorporated into practice