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 […]
Category: Vaccines
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 […]
Are the Unvaccinated Unwittingly Enrolled into a Human Challenge Trial?
By Rafael Escandon. Dr. Walter Reed, between 1900-1901 designed and supervised a Human Challenge Trial (HCT) in Cuba in the search for the causative agent of yellow fever. While the 3 phases of Dr. Reed’s HCT were definitive in their establishment that yellow fever was transmitted via a mosquito-borne vector, ethical questions over the methods, […]
Persuading anti-vaxxers: Stop talking about facts
By Michelle Bach. Even before the coronavirus pandemic, the WHO named vaccine hesitancy as one of the top ten threats to global health. The WHO attributes vaccine hesitancy to factors such as a lack of confidence, complacency, and convenience. In the UK, hesitancy has been associated with certain demographic factors such as race, age, and […]
“I am used to my happy life, not this” – why mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations for care home staff is an essential humanitarian and ethical intervention
By Ayesha Ahmad. When traditional healers heal, they empathise with the pain being endured. The traditional healer is distinguished by their strength and ability to channel the suffering through, and beyond, them. What this shows is that there is a distinction between the person who is a healer and the person who is being healed. […]
Do controlled human infection studies put bystanders at higher risk than conventional field trials?
By Kyungdo Lee and Nir Eyal. A dose-determining study toward the world’s first controlled human infection (abbreviated as CHI) COVID vaccine study has launched in the UK. A COVID vaccine CHI would typically enroll a few dozen young and healthy volunteers, excluding people at higher risk of severe outcomes. After admission to an isolated research […]
UK COVID-19 human challenge trials need participants. International volunteers are ready to heed the call
By Zacharia Kafuko. Last month, the UK government approved a bold innovation that will take us closer to finally ending the COVID-19 pandemic: human challenge trials, which involve deliberately exposing volunteers to the coronavirus to help researchers study the disease. The first trial began in London in early March, involving up to ninety volunteers. Another trial, which […]
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 […]