Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) was an extraordinary example of a public-private partnership (PPP) that brought together over thirty organizations and hundreds of individuals to address one of the most pressing global health needs in recent decades. In particular, ACTIV provided a key avenue for testing numerous therapeutics for their potential benefit in treating the SARS-CoV-2 virus or the resulting symptoms of acute COVID-19 infection. Given the speed and scale at which ACTIV designed and implemented master protocols across global networks that it was simultaneously working to create, the PPP can provide valuable lessons for best practices and avoiding pitfalls the next time the world is faced with a global pandemic of a novel pathogen. This report provides a general overview of the ACTIV partnership to set the stage and context for the subsequent articles in this issue that will relay these lessons learned.

Across the globe, welfare conditionality and sanctioning increasingly permeate social welfare programs. Paternalism is one of the key normative rationales invoked when both scholars and politicians debate the legitimacy of this reform. With a view to bringing the scholarly and political debates into closer conversation with each other, this paper examines how paternalism manifests in political debate. We systematically analyse the paternalist arguments made by Australian federal parliamentarians in favour of the virtually identical 2017 and 2018 policy proposals to drug test welfare recipients, both of which resulted in a stalemate. We find that paternalistic arguments primarily employed soft, weak, and welfare paternalism, with heavy emphasis on the purported benefits of the intervention, limited emphasis on the issue of personal liberty, and noticeable silence about autonomy and consent. These findings shed light on the scholarly features of paternalism that are obscured in contemporary political discourse. This analysis can direct political philosophers to features of paternalism that need more attention as well as suggest ways that drug and welfare policy advocates may engage more effectively with paternalist arguments.