By Landon J Getz and Francoise Baylis hVIVO, a for-profit clinical research organization in London, in collaboration with Imperial College London, has initiated a human challenge study in youth between the ages of 18 and 30 to determine the dose at which individuals become infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The dose-ranging study, […]
Category: Pandemic
What money can’t buy: Why we shouldn’t pay people to get vaccinated
By Nancy S. Jecker A utilitarian thinks ethics is a lot like math. We want to produce the greatest good. If a disease will create a lot of harm and a vaccine will create a lot of good, we should do what it takes to get shots in arms. If it takes paying people, then […]
The first-year anniversary of the application of telemedicine to early medical abortions in UK
By Ilaria Bertini The 30th of March 2021 marks an year since the UK Government implemented the new guidelines on medical abortion in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Thanks to the use of telemedicine women’s homes have been approved as a class of place for both stages of early medical abortion (EMA up to 10 […]
Coffee or covid?
By Stephen John and Emma Curran. For the past year, the surprisingly popular Costa Coffee shop down the street has been either shut or takeaway only. As a result, lots of people have missed out on their regular caffeine hit. Of course, there’s a good reason for closing Costa: to stop the spread of COVID-19. […]
Should we adopt COVID-19 “immunity passports”?
By Victoria Min-Yi Wang. The COVID-19 pandemic has led the UK to impose lockdown measures that have reduced personal freedoms normally taken for granted in a liberal democracy. This loss of freedoms has been justified because it protects people from contracting COVID-19 and, consequently, prevents overwhelming the NHS. After a year of lockdown measures, and […]
The vicious circle of precaution
By Ezio Di Nucci. The precautionary principle has been implicitly utilized and explicitly invoked in March of 2020 when many governments introduced restrictions and lockdowns to contain COVID-19. ‘Implicitly utilized’ because the preliminary evidence and modelling those restrictions were based on was a good example of the kinds of problems the precautionary principle is meant […]
Valuing the care in healthcare: priorities and trade-offs
By Jonathan Michaels. Healthcare decisions are complex, whether we are considering individual choices about our own health, or policy decisions made by political or professional bodies. Disease and the actions taken to prevent, diagnose and treat it, may have widespread ramifications on all aspects of our lives. Furthermore, policy and personal decisions in other aspects […]
Lateral flow tests and schools: Why the government’s approach is ethically flawed
By Jonathan Pugh, Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu. The UK government has put lateral flow antigen tests (LFATs) at the forefront of its strategy to re-open schools. These tests can be used to detect current infections, and they can provide results quickly at the point of care. The tests themselves also have a low financial […]
You’ve got to be in it to win it: The promise and practice of vaccine lotteries
By Jane Williams, Chris Degeling, Angus Dawson, Stacy Carter Following the 2009 H1N1 pandemic there was a small explosion in the ethics literature on how to allocate scarce pandemic vaccine. There were many different suggestions about how we should distribute vaccine in an ethical way. One proposal was that a random allocation through a lottery, weighted […]
Connecting the Dots: COVID-19, BAME Communities, and Racial Injustice
By Aileen Editha The COVID-19 pandemic impacted England (and the world) in ways that no one could have imagined. One that is incredibly disappointing, however, is the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) communities in terms of exposure and mortality rates, as well as the recent data on vaccination […]