By Caroline Redhead. The effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the NHS have been profound. The cycle of starting, suspending and restarting routine services, which will be ongoing for some time and continue alongside normal winter pressures, is in itself a major incident for the NHS. As we moved from the acute and into the […]
Category: Pandemic
Is it acceptable to pay nothing or little to challenge trial participants?
By Sandro Ambuehl, Axel Ockenfels and Alvin E Roth. Concerns with (high) incentives feature prominently among ethicists. In the broad public and amongst economists, by contrast, there is much agreement that workers providing a service should be compensated fairly, and that work involving more discomfort and risk should be compensated more generously. This intuition extends […]
Have enough people died?
By Ezio Di Nucci. You are probably tired of discussing COVID-19; but please bear with me because the question I want to address here is a bit unusual: not whether too many people have died because of the pandemic, but whether too few people might have actually died. No, that’s not a typo – but […]
Frauds and misconduct in scientific research: a harsh lesson from the pandemic
By Erik Boetto and Davide Golinelli. Frauds and misconduct have been common in the history of science. A well-known example is that of former-doctor A.J. Wakefield, who published a study in 1998 reporting the association between measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination and a syndrome of autism in children. Only in 2011 was it proven that […]
How much money would it take for you to be infected with COVID-19 for research?
By Olivia Grimwade and Julian Savulescu. Controlled Human Infection Model (CHIM) research involves infecting otherwise healthy people with a disease in order to improve our knowledge of the disease and/or to test vaccine candidates. In the hope of halting the deaths, infections and lockdowns caused by the COVID 19 pandemic, CHIMs have been identified as […]
Would you enroll in this Covid-19 vaccine trial? — Ethical considerations for protecting the options of subjects in primary epidemic vaccine trials
By Arthur L. Caplan and Jerrold L. Abraham. We responded to the review in JME by Monrad about ethical issues in vaccine trials, in which the discussion was limited to secondary vaccine trials (i.e. testing additional vaccines after one or more vaccines have been approved). We are concerned that the ethics of ongoing primary vaccine […]
The problem in nursing homes is not Covid-19 – it is nursing homes
By Tania Moerenhout A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times published a scathing article on how the pandemic was handled in Belgian nursing homes, focusing on instances where elderly were declined hospitalisation despite the fact that intensive care beds remained available. Refusing hospital care to nursing home residents was never the official policy, […]
Immunity passports, fundamental rights and public health hazards: A reply to Brown et al.
By Iñigo de Miguel Beriain and Jon Rueda Etxebarria In a recent article published by the Journal of Medical Ethics, Brown et al. analysed several ethical aspects around immunity passports and put forward some recommendations for implementing them. When we first read this paper, we considered that it was an excellent piece of analysis, but […]
Lockdown is not levelling down
By Jonathan A Hughes In their article “Why lockdown of the elderly is not ageist and why levelling down equality is wrong” and their related JME Blog post, Savulescu and Cameron argue for selective isolation of the elderly as preferable to a continuation of general lockdown. Central to their argument is the claim that the […]
The importance of mourning rituals to the dead
By Luís Cordeiro-Rodrigues. In Sophocles’ play Antigone, Creon, the new ruler of Thebes, decides that, as a punishment for Polynices’s rebellion, Polynices will not receive a proper funeral but will instead lie unburied on the battlefield to be eaten by animals. Antigone, one of Polynices’s sisters, defies Creon’s orders and gives her brother a funeral […]