By Helen Watt The race is on to produce a COVID-19 vaccine: teams are working hard and fast across the world. We all long to see a vaccine in record time – but must, of course, have an eye to ethics too. Debates on vaccine ethics tend to focus on risks, whether to participants in […]
Category: Pandemic
The COVID19 pandemic and ethics through the eyes of women
By Pauline Capdevielle, Amaranta Manrique de Lara, María de Jesús Medina Arellano This year’s International Women’s Day was a historic occurrence in Mexico. Tens of thousands of women took to the streets on the eighth and then chose to vanish on the ninth. Each day in its own way, the so-called 8M and 9M were […]
ICU triage: How many lives or whose lives?
By Angela Ballantyne Bioethicists around the world have been asked to advise on the goals and methods of triage protocols. Estimates suggest 5% of COVID19 cases will require ICU care. The key ethical tension is between utility and equity. There are other relevant principles of fair allocation such as reciprocity for frontline workers who have […]
COVID-19: In focussing on intensive care we must not lose sight of the wider professional duty to care for all patients.
By Anne Slowther and Sarah Mitchell As the number of cases and number of deaths from COVID-19 continues to rise exponentially much of the health care response, and subsequent bioethics commentary, has focussed on provision of intensive care for critically ill patients who require ventilation. This is understandable given the mismatch between the number of people […]
Ethical rationing: Hydroxychloroquine, COVID-19 and the inequality of diseases
By Yves Saint James Aquino and Nicolo Cabrera The controversy surrounding the off-label use of hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) for COVID-19 highlights the inherent inequality of disease conditions. In this brief ethics explainer, we argue that we need to make explicit the clinical and non-clinical factors that determine the inequality of diseases. The varying appraisals of disease […]
The vital contexts of coronavirus
By David Shaw The coronavirus pandemic has taken over all our lives, confining most people to their homes and killing tens of thousands around the world. Every day we are updated on the latest infection rates and mortality figures, and speculate about how long the lockdown will last. Yet what is missing from much of […]
Responding to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic: Experiences of an ad hoc public health ethics consultation
By Verina Wild, Alena Buyx, Samia Hurst, Christian Munthe, Annette Rid, Daniel Strech, Alison Thompson. Clinical ethics consultations are a well established method to deal with ethically problematic situations in clinical care, even in emergency situations. But an emergency public health ethics consultation? This was unusual for most of us. Public health authorities in many […]
Health Care Professionals Are Under No Ethical Obligation to Treat COVID-19 Patients
By Udo Schuklenk. Even a cursory look at the news tells us that many doctors and nurses are reluctant to provide care to COVID-19 patients. Personal protective equipment (PPE) levels in Australia’s state of Queensland are very low, writes the state’s Clinical Senate Chair Alex Markwell. Bulgaria has seen a wave of doctors resigning, Zimbabwean […]
Your family or your job? Balancing the duty to treat with the duty to family in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic
By Doug McConnell At an aged-care home in Australia, most of the social care workers abstained from work after a COVID-19 outbreak at the facility. They cited concern for their family members, some of whom were immunocompromised. Physicians and nurses in the UK have threatened to quit because a lack of adequate personal protective equipment […]
Personal Protective Equipment for front-line health workers: an ethical imperative
By Elizabeth Fenton Covid-19 poses risks to health care workers that exceed those posed to members of the public. Repeated exposure to infected patients increases their risk of infection, and might also make their symptoms more severe if they become infected. Although reported numbers vary, in Italy approximately 9% of COVID-19 cases are health workers, […]