By Hideki Kakeya. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, public health authorities failed to convey correct information on the newly emerging virus. On January 14, 2020 the World Health Organization (WHO) posted on its official twitter (currently X) account “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission […]
Category: COVID-19
Letting the side down – should vaccination refusal influence healthcare resource allocation?
By Isaac Jarratt-Barnham. We live in an increasingly polarised, siloed and fractured world. The week in UK politics as I write shows this all too starkly – five days ago, 300,000 protesters marched through London for peace in Palestine, the far-right attempted to storm the cenotaph, and 145 were arrested for crimes including racially aggravated […]
If only we’d known
By Edwin Jesudason. Lee Fierro was an actress who played Mrs Kintner in the Steven Spielberg classic “Jaws”. After slapping Chief Brodie, a sheriff with responsibilities for public safety, she cries: “I just found out that a girl got killed here last week and you knew, you knew there was a shark out there. You […]
Ethics of college vaccine mandates: reply to Høeg et al.
By Leo Lam, Taylor Nichols, Hannah Larson. We thank Tracy Beth Høeg, et al. for their reply to our response paper ‘Ethics of college vaccine mandates, using reasonable comparisons’. Our paper showed that the risk-benefit calculation to mandate vaccines on college campuses benefits students and the community and is ethical. We performed risk-benefit analyses using […]
Vaccine mandates can result in people losing their jobs. Does that make them unethical?
By Maxwell J. Smith. Consider: Kelly is a nurse who has been employed by her city’s general hospital for nearly thirty years. She is single, has two kids preparing to go to university, and a mortgage to pay. Her job is threatened when she is told that, as a condition of continuing her employment, she […]
Does our preoccupation with resilience mean we must tolerate the morally intolerable?
By Rebecca Farrington, Louise Tomkow, Gabrielle Prager, and Kitty Worthing. Healthcare professionals are increasingly expected to be hardy and ‘suck it up’ to survive in complex and demoralising workplaces. As NHS clinicians, we saw staffing shortages and limited resources firsthand during the COVID-19 pandemic. These experiences magnified our scepticism about the onus on us, as […]