By Felicitas Holzer, Federico Germani, Ivette Ortiz Alcántara, Julian März & Nikola Biller-Andorno Equal access to vaccines has been one of the key ethical challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Most scholars consider the massive purchase and hoarding of vaccines by high-income countries, especially at the beginning of the pandemic, to be unjust towards vulnerable people […]
Category: Vaccines
Mandating flu jab, but not COVID-19 jab, ethically justified for healthcare staff
Press release Few side effects; cuts infection risks; minimises staff shortages and presenteeism And professional obligations to patients trump personal freedom, argue ethicists Mandating the flu jab for healthcare staff is ethically justified, but the same can’t be said of the COVID-19 jab, argue leading ethicists in an extended essay published online in the Journal of […]
Global vaccine equity for COVID-19: A myriad of proposals, but are there too many cooks or too many recipes?
By Susi Geiger & Aisling McMahon. As we are nearing the second year-end in the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine inequity is a stark global reality: on December 13th 2021, while global vaccine coverage stands at 56% of the population, this figure drops to 7.1% for low-income countries. In addition, new variants such as Omicron threaten to […]
Regulating strain-specific vaccines – speed, rigour and challenge trials
By Jonathan Pugh and Dominic Wilkinson. The emergence of the Omicron variant has prompted a great deal of uncertainty. One significant area of uncertainty is the the extent to which the variant can escape the protection afforded by current vaccines. One early South African pre-print suggests that Omicron has more extensive Pfizer vaccine escape than […]
I see no ships – ethical blindness in mandated vaccination of care home and NHS staff
By Fr Giles Pinnock. As of November 11th 2021, vaccination of care home staff in England against COVID-19 became mandatory. Responses to the Government’s own consultation did not support it, and the negative impact on the care of residents, and the inevitable upstream impact on discharges from hospitals has barely registered in the media, which […]
Delaying COVID-19 Boosters: the Duty to Vaccinate the World
By Nancy S. Jecker The Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO) has urged a temporary halt to COVID-19 boosters to enable 10% of the people of every nation to be vaccinated. Despite solid ethical backing for this stance, a spate of countries has gone full steam ahead with booster shots. Israel was the first, […]
Is vaccination status an acceptable factor in triage?
By Angela Wentz Faulconer. More than 625,000 people in the United States and over 4.4 million people worldwide have died from Covid-19. As the Delta variant surges, many hospitals find themselves caring for patients in hallways, with no ECMO available and every ICU bed taken. A growing number of physicians have suggested that as hospitals become overwhelmed, we might weigh vaccination status as […]
Coercive vaccination: using the ‘seat belt analogy’ is not effective
By Iñigo de Miguel Beriain. The debate about coercive vaccination is gaining intensity in most Western countries. One of the arguments that have been put forward in recent days in support of coercive vaccination has been that of the ‘seat belt analogy (SBA)’, originally proposed by Giubilini and Savulescu. This argument states that, since the […]
Boosters’ global ethics
By Ezio Di Nucci. Make no mistake: boosters work – if ‘working’ means significant reduction in infection, hospitalization, and death in those individuals who receive third doses of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. The data out of Israel is so obvious even philosophers can read it. Let us therefore not confuse calls to avoid or delay […]
Vaccination, uncertainty, and the right to take risks
By Pei-hua Huang. Earlier this year, some patients developed a very rare and severe form of blood clot after receiving Covid-19 vaccines produced by AstraZeneca. The report prompted several countries to suspend the use of the AstraZeneca vaccines. The European Medicines Agency also stepped in and launched an investigation. We still don’t have a complete […]