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Ethics and Pandemic Response
Selected resources from The Hastings Center. Bioethics Briefings: Pandemics: The Ethics of Mandatory and Voluntary Interventions Nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPI) such as isolation and quarantine, school closures, and social distancing measures...Bioethics Forum Essay
When Endemic Disparities Catch the Pandemic Flu: Echoes of Kubler-Ross and Rawls
Read “When Endemic Disparities Catch the Pandemic Flu: Echoes of Kubler-Ross and Rawls”
COVID-19
Ethical Framework for Health Care Institutions & Guidelines for Institutional Ethics Services Responding to the Coronavirus Pandemic
Managing Uncertainty, Safeguarding Communities, Guiding Practice Download as PDF Nancy Berlinger, PhD; Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH; Tia Powell, MD; D. Micah Hester, PhD; Aimee Milliken, RN, PhD, HEC-C; Rachel Fabi,...From Bioethics Briefings
Pandemics: The Ethics of Mandatory and Voluntary Interventions
[This chapter is adapted from “Influenza Pandemic,” by Alexandra Minna Stern and Howard Markel, in From Birth to Death and Bench to Clinic: The Hastings Center Bioethics Briefing Book for...Read “Pandemics: The Ethics of Mandatory and Voluntary Interventions”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Pandemic Language
Bioethics Forum Essay
Cracks in the System: Lessons Learned from the Covid-19 Pandemic
The United States leads the world in coronavirus cases and deaths. Although many people have called out the inadequacies of our health care system, Covid-19 has exposed the most significant shortcomings. The need for change can no longer be ignored. Here are three lessons from this pandemic that should be leveraged for change.Read “Cracks in the System: Lessons Learned from the Covid-19 Pandemic”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Confronting Disability Discrimination During the Pandemic
As hospitals and public health authorities devise triage protocols to allocate scarce critical-care resources during the Covid-19 pandemic, people with disabilities are expressing alarm that these protocols devalue them and exacerbate long-entrenched ableism in health care. Lawsuits alleging disability discrimination in have been filed in Washington and Alabama. The U.S. Office for Civil Rights is investigating disability discrimination complaints in triage protocols. The challenge is to develop protocols that will minimize discrimination in the health care system.Read “Confronting Disability Discrimination During the Pandemic”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Surrogate Decision-Making for Incarcerated Patients: A Pandemic-Inspired Call to Action
As Covid-19 continues to plague the United States, insufficient attention has been paid to the role that incarcerated persons play in the persistence of this pandemic and the work that...Read “Surrogate Decision-Making for Incarcerated Patients: A Pandemic-Inspired Call to Action”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Surprising Surge of Egg Freezing during the Pandemic Raises Ethical Questions
Contrary to the expectations of many fertility clinics, demand for egg freezing has increased sharply during the Covid-19 pandemic, highlighting longstanding ethical concerns about egg freezing clinics.Read “Surprising Surge of Egg Freezing during the Pandemic Raises Ethical Questions”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Measure Twice and Cut Once: The Value of Health Care Ethicists in the Pandemic
The major success story of health care ethicists in the pandemic has been their role in establishing ventilator triage policies. But they have more to offer the C-suite of health care institutions.Read “Measure Twice and Cut Once: The Value of Health Care Ethicists in the Pandemic”
Bioethics Forum Essay
On Being an Elder in a Pandemic
Do the elderly have special obligations during a pandemic, that is, something more than the duty we all have for hand washing, social distancing, and so on? I believe the answer is, yes, and foremost among these is an obligation for parsimonious use of newly scarce and expensive health care resources.Bioethics Forum Essay
Is the Coronavirus Pandemic Accelerating Bioethics Nationalism?
The global crisis created by the coronavirus pandemic and the rush to create and distribute a vaccine widely hoped to be a “silver bullet” that can facilitate a return to “normalcy” threatens to upend seven decades of assumptions about bioethical norms.Read “Is the Coronavirus Pandemic Accelerating Bioethics Nationalism?”
HASTINGS CENTER REPORT
Scarcity in the Covid-19 Pandemic
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Ethics and Public Health
Selected resources from The Hastings Center. Bioethics Briefings: Public Health Ethics and Law Public health encompasses what society does to assure the conditions that are necessary for its members to...Page
Disaster Planning and Bioethics
Selected resources from The Hastings Center. Bioethics Briefings: Disaster Planning and Public Health Bioethics Briefing A public health emergency exists when the health consequences of a decision have the potential...Bioethics Forum Essay
Financing Reforms to Meet a Pivotal Moment in Global Health
This year will be the most important moment for global health since WHO’s founding in 1948, but only if states give major reforms their full political and financial backing.Read “Financing Reforms to Meet a Pivotal Moment in Global Health”
Hastings Center News
Relational Public Health: Pandemic Policies that Support Health Equity
Federally Qualified Health Centers—federally funded nonprofit primary care centers—were critical points of access for underserved patients during the Covid pandemic, administering 61% of their Covid vaccinations to people of color,...Read “Relational Public Health: Pandemic Policies that Support Health Equity”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Using the Pandemic as an Excuse to Limit Abortion
Several states, including Ohio, Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, Iowa, and Oklahoma, declared abortion a nonessential service at some point during the pandemic, meaning that it was effectively banned until the crisis passed. Supporters of the policies maintain that abortion is an elective procedure whose medical resources are better off used in the fight against the pandemic. But abortion opponents have been taking advantage of the current circumstances to limit abortion access.Bioethics Forum Essay
Bioethics, Nazi Analogies, and the Coronavirus Pandemic
The year 2020 will be remembered as the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. But the pandemic was not alone in creating fear and dismay and raising ethical questions. Think of the rise in antisemitism, police violence against Black people, protests against immigration, and rallies by groups espousing Nazi slogans and symbols. Hate crimes, including murder, are the highest in years, according to the most recent FBI report, and were particularly aimed at Jews and Hispanics. Asian-Americans have been targeted as carriers of the so-called “China virus.”Read “Bioethics, Nazi Analogies, and the Coronavirus Pandemic”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Ethics of Emergency Use Authorization During the Pandemic
The Food and Drug Administration's rigorous guidance for an emergency use authorization of a Covid vaccine was met by resistance from the White House, since some of the terms would make it virtually impossible to issue a vaccine-related emergency authorization before Election Day. Understanding the ethical dimensions of issuing it for a vaccine can provide clarity on the necessity of the FDA’s stringent guidelines.Read “Ethics of Emergency Use Authorization During the Pandemic”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Teaching Medical Ethics During the Pandemic
Despite the disruptive changes to my undergraduate medical ethics class this semester, my students have learned a lot about the paradox that the coronavirus presents: it is an unprecedented event, beyond the experience of nearly everyone alive today, and yet it puts on grim display the well-known problems of inequality that chronically plague the United States. Since week six of the semester, I have readjusted each unit on the syllabus to address some of the ethical issues that Covid-19 has brought to the fore, familiar challenges that have been stressed and distorted in astonishing ways by the pandemic.Hastings Center News
Ethics and Pandemic Policies: Democracy in Crisis
Ethics guidance during the Covid-19 pandemic has been valuable in informing some health policies and practices, such as oversight of research and crisis standards of care. But it has been...Bioethics Forum Essay
A Doctor Confronts the Burden of Judgment during the Pandemic
Is it wrong for doctors to judge their patients’ choices? I have reflected on this question while being on the frontline of the Covid-19 pandemic in New York City. Health...Read “A Doctor Confronts the Burden of Judgment during the Pandemic”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Why I Don’t Support Age-Related Rationing During the Covid Pandemic
Some bioethicists support age-related rationing of ventilators during the Covid-19 pandemic as a way to save the most lives. But that goal might be better realized without strict age cutoffs.Read “Why I Don’t Support Age-Related Rationing During the Covid Pandemic”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Resilience and the Twin Medical Catastrophes of War and Pandemic
As I sit here in my office at the Slovak Medical University in Bratislava, my colleagues are experiencing great moral anguish because of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine. Simultaneously, we are also confronting the Omicron wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. The war complicates and burdens health care here and in other border nations exponentially, and especially so in combination with the pandemic.Read “Resilience and the Twin Medical Catastrophes of War and Pandemic”
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Bioethics and Racism
Selected resources from The Hastings Center. Bioethics Briefings: Racism and Health Equity Racism threatens health equity by withholding resources people need for proper health based on morally arbitrary features like...Bioethics Forum Essay
Hacking Ventilators in a Pandemic
The Covid-19 pandemic continues to test and occasionally overwhelm health care institutions. Many practitioners may face the ethically challenging scenario of having to ration ventilators while triaging patients in “crisis care.” Ventilator shortages have led to innovative ventilator design “hacks.” Are these improvised ventilators ethical?Bioethics Forum Essay
Sustaining Clinical Empathy During the Pandemic
As Covid-19 continues to spread throughout the United States, doctors, nurses, and oth-er clinicians are facing unmistakable tragedies. But something less perceptible is afoot. Empathy in medicine is under siege.Bioethics Forum Essay
Religion During the Coronavirus Pandemic: Islamic Bioethical Perspectives
Congregational rituals of religious communities around the world have attracted attention for their possible threat of spreading the coronavirus. Negative Media coverage has generally depicted members of religious communities as more or less “reckless” groups whose “fanatic” convictions can make them harm others from inside or outside their religious traditions. However, what hasn’t been discussed is how this issue should be approached as a complex bioethical issue that concerns people worldwide. With the beginning of Ramadan, paying attention to the nuances and complexities of this issue becomes especially pressing.Read “Religion During the Coronavirus Pandemic: Islamic Bioethical Perspectives”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Amid the Pandemic and Racial Injustice, Greater Empathy in Medical School
Empathy does not need to dissipate as we endure medical training. Both the pandemic and the national reckoning over racial injustice and police brutality have touched every aspect of life as we know it, and medical training and education have been no exception.Read “Amid the Pandemic and Racial Injustice, Greater Empathy in Medical School”
Bioethics Forum Essay
U.S. and Canada: Being Good Neighbors in the Pandemic
Canada has a fraction of the number of cases of Covid-19 as the U.S. Canadians feel vulnerable. But Canadians and Americans need to find ways to build and maintain trust within and across our borders.Read “U.S. and Canada: Being Good Neighbors in the Pandemic”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Global Health Justice: Now Is the Time
The recognition of the social injustices surrounding the pandemic is an important opportunity to understand the longstanding links between health and social and global justice.Page
Ethics and the End of Life
Selected resources from The Hastings Center. Bioethics Briefings: End of Life Care The central philosophical question in end-of-life care is how to make decisions surrounding the numerous choices about what...Page
Access to Therapeutic and Palliative Drugs in the Context of Covid-19: Justice and the Relief of Suffering
Hastings Center News
In the Media: The Hastings Center Responds to Covid-19
Hastings Center research scholars have been talking with the press and writing on ethical issues raised by the coronavirus pandemic. Here is a selected roundup. Check back for updates.Read “In the Media: The Hastings Center Responds to Covid-19”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Are Physicians Hypocrites for Supporting Black Lives Matter Protests and Opposing Anti-Lockdown Protests? An Ethical Analysis
Physicians have been vocal in condemning the anti-lockdown protests while endorsing and even participating in the Black Lives Matter protests. This has led to criticism of the medical community for being inconsistent and hypocritical. What does an ethical analysis reveal?Page
The Five People You Meet in a Pandemic—And What They Need from You Today
This bioethics background paper describes ethical decision-making during an influenza pandemic. Download the report for free.Read “The Five People You Meet in a Pandemic—And What They Need from You Today”
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Transcript: Re-Opening the Nation: Privacy, Surveillance and Digital Tools for Contact Tracing
Bioethics Forum Essay
After the Anniversary of Covid, Reckoning with Many New Normals
Anniversaries are complicated. In rehabilitation psychology, the anniversary of an accident that caused a brain or spinal cord injury can be a time for profound gratitude and for grief. Now that we have passed the one-year anniversary of the Covid pandemic, each of us continues to deal with the repercussions and wondering what the "new normal" may look like.Read “After the Anniversary of Covid, Reckoning with Many New Normals”
Bioethics Forum Essay
WHO-China Report on Covid: Important Step Forward, More to Be Done
The World Health Organization recently released a long-anticipated report on SARS-CoV-2 origins, based on 28 days of field research and site visits in China conducted jointly by 17 international and...Read “WHO-China Report on Covid: Important Step Forward, More to Be Done”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Covid Doesn’t Justify Cutting Corners on Medical Interpretation
Many hospitals are providing incomplete or subpar professional medical interpretation to the patients who need it--many of whom are disproportionately affected by Covid.Read “Covid Doesn’t Justify Cutting Corners on Medical Interpretation”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Bringing Ethics into the Global Coronavirus Response
Covid-19 is a matter of public and global health ethics, and the pandemic is currently accelerating cooperation within and contributions from these fields. A meeting on June 27, hosted by the European Union and Global Citizen, is the latest example another global pledging event on June 27, will include governments and large institutions, as well as individuals and communities worldwide.Bioethics Forum Essay
“If the virus doesn’t kill us, the stress and anxiety will.” Immigrants during Covid
Growing isolation, financial challenges and disease burden during the Covid-19 pandemic threaten to worsen the mental health needs of the entire U.S. population. These challenges are heightened among immigrants with untreated chronic mental health conditions as they experience added psychological distress owing to harsh immigration policies and worsening structural barriers to health during the pandemic.Read ““If the virus doesn’t kill us, the stress and anxiety will.” Immigrants during Covid”
COVID-19 RESOURCES
Ethics Guidance and Resources on Covid-19
As communities across the world work to navigate the pandemic, The Hastings Center has assembled ethics resources for responding to novel coronavirus Covid-19. We are updating this hub throughout the...Hastings Center News
Ethics Guidance and Resources on Covid-19
As communities across the world work to navigate the pandemic, The Hastings Center has assembled ethics resources for responding to novel coronavirus Covid-19. We are updating this hub throughout the...Bioethics Forum Essay
Covid-19 in Argentina and the Abuse of Bioethics
Many Latin American countries are being devastated by excessive loss of life from Covid-19, many sectors of society falling below the poverty line, and health systems being overwhelmed. As collateral damage, some countries in the region are witnessing an eruption of populism and autocratic trends and an increasing erosion of already weak and unstable democracies. Can bioethics be a useful tool for managing this crisis? Argentina provides a case study.Page
Ethical Challenges in the Middle Tier of Covid-19 Vaccine Allocation: Guidance for Organizational Decision-Making
Download PDF Nancy Berlinger, PhD; Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH; Tia Powell, MD; Aimee Milliken, RN, PhD, HEC-C; Parinda Khatri, PhD; Fatma Marouf, JD, MPH; Keisha Ray, PhD; Johanna Crane, PhD...Bioethics Forum Essay
Why Health Care Workers Should Receive Priority Care for Covid-19
The Covid-19 pandemic has imposed tremendous risk on doctors, nurses, and other health care workers not seen in a century. It is time to reconsider prioritization of health care workers’ access to scare critical resources. Historically, for multiple reasons, health care workers have not been prioritized for access to medical care during a pandemic. However, given the unprecedented circumstances surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic, it is justifiable to prioritize health care workers when all else is equal between two patients.Read “Why Health Care Workers Should Receive Priority Care for Covid-19”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Fear of Doing Too Much Too Soon or Too Little Too Late: Research on Covid-19
The Covid-19 pandemic has significantly affected the practice of clinical research. Researchers and IRBs have felt an urgency to respond more quickly than usual, aware that lives are at stake.Read “Fear of Doing Too Much Too Soon or Too Little Too Late: Research on Covid-19”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Social-Change Games Can Help Us Understand the Public Health Choices We Face
Before there was the Covid-19 pandemic, there was Pandemic. This tabletop game, in which players collaborate to fight disease outbreaks, debuted in 2007. Expansions feature weaponized pathogens, historic pandemics, zoonotic diseases, and vaccine development races. Game mechanics modelled on pandemic vectors provide multiple narratives: battle, quest, detection, discovery. There is satisfaction in playing “against” disease–and winning. Real pandemic is not as tidy as a game. But can games support understanding about the societal challenges we now face? Yes.Read “Social-Change Games Can Help Us Understand the Public Health Choices We Face”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Covid-19 Makes Clear that Bioethics Must Confront Health Disparities
With some reluctance, I’ve come to the sad realization the COVID-19 pandemic has been a stress test for bioethics, a field of study that intersects medicine, law, the humanities and the social sciences. As both a physician and medical ethicist, I arrived at this conclusion after spending months at what was once the epicenter of the pandemic: New York City. I was overseeing a 24/7 bioethics consultation service.Read “Covid-19 Makes Clear that Bioethics Must Confront Health Disparities”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Report from Sub-Saharan Africa: “When the Health Fundamentals Are Weak, Covid Will Expose You.”
The cries of millions of people in Sub-Saharan Africa and in low- and middle-income countries elsewhere who are struggling to stay alive because of Covid-19 and the lockdowns call for us to revisit the conceptual framework of the human right to health.Bioethics Forum Essay
Efficacy is Relative in a Public Health Crisis: Evaluating the Next Wave of Covid-19 Vaccines
A third Covid vaccine candidate moving closer to potential FDA authorization is less effective than the two Covid vaccines already authorized in the United States. Is it ethical to offer a vaccine with lower efficacy? Is it ethical not to offer it in a public health emergency?Read “Efficacy is Relative in a Public Health Crisis: Evaluating the Next Wave of Covid-19 Vaccines”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Science in the Biden White House: Eric Lander, Alondra Nelson, and the Legacy of Lewis Thomas
Science has replaced populism in the White House. For the first time, the president's science advisor will be elevated to cabinet rank. There are other good omens, as well.Read “Science in the Biden White House: Eric Lander, Alondra Nelson, and the Legacy of Lewis Thomas”
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Advancing Social Justice, Health Equity, and Community
TRANSCRIPT: February 9, 2021 Hello, good afternoon. If you’re on the East Coast and welcome to the annual Daniel Callahan lecture, advancing social justice, health, equity and Community. We are...Read “Advancing Social Justice, Health Equity, and Community”
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Ethics and Aging
Selected resources from The Hastings Center. Bioethics Briefings: AgingThere is a steady rise in world population growth with the fastest proportional increase coming from the elderly. Technological advances in medicine...Bioethics Forum Essay
The Americans with Disabilities Act at 30: A Cause for Celebration During Covid-19?
A central mandate of the ADA is to make the goods of society accessible to people with disabilities and overcome their segregation in civil society through reasonable accommodation that allows them to go to work, live with their neighbors, and avoid institutionalization. But let’s not delude ourselves with historic sentimentality as disability law is placed under tremendous stress by the pandemic.Read “The Americans with Disabilities Act at 30: A Cause for Celebration During Covid-19?”
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TRANSCRIPT: Communicating Ethical Challenges in Crises
Novmber 15, 2022 Transcription by machine — may contain errors Elizabeth Lanphier So thank you all for being here today. It’s my pleasure to welcome you to this inaugural session...Read “TRANSCRIPT: Communicating Ethical Challenges in Crises”
Bioethics Forum Essay
A Student’s Perspective: Universities Must Require Vaccination
Colleges and universities have an ethical obligation to mandate covid vaccines to protect the health and futures of both their students and the larger communities, in addition to promoting equality through education.Read “A Student’s Perspective: Universities Must Require Vaccination”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Against Personal Ventilator Reallocation
Personal ventilators used by people with disabilities should not reallocated to people with Covid-19. Triage protocols should be immediately clarified and explicitly state that personal ventilators will be protected in all cases.Page
Advancing Housing & Health Equity for Older Adults
The Covid-19 RECAPP Report: Advancing Housing & Health Equity for Older Adults: Pandemic Innovations and Policy Ideas Report Summary and Recommendations This grant-funded collaborative research led by Nancy Berlinger of The...Bioethics Forum Essay
Crowdfunding for Covid-Related Needs: Unfair and Inadequate
One-third of all new GoFundMe campaigns in the United States are for COVID-19-related needs. This shows where we have failed as a society. It is a makeshift response to institutional failures and not a fair or sustainable solution to crises.Read “Crowdfunding for Covid-Related Needs: Unfair and Inadequate”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Individual Freedom or Public Health? A False Choice in the Covid Era
When scientists first suggested population-wide social distancing as the only feasible way to suppress Covid-19, they were the first to admit it may not work in a free society. We are now months into placing mass restrictions on human behavior to suppress a virus that lacks an effective vaccine or treatment. Now is the time to ask: is this the authoritarian nightmare many feared, or will freedom and democracy survive Covid-19?Read “Individual Freedom or Public Health? A False Choice in the Covid Era”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Covid-19 Vaccination Certificates: Prospects and Problems
Now, with limited distribution of vaccines with varying degrees of efficacy there is renewed interest in immunity passports; more accurately described as vaccination certificates. What remains to be determined is who may use this documentation for what purpose.Read “Covid-19 Vaccination Certificates: Prospects and Problems”
Hastings Center News
Hastings Center Welcomes 13 New Fellows
The Hastings Center is pleased to announce the election of the 2023 fellows. Hastings Center fellows are a group of more than 200 individuals of outstanding accomplishment whose work has...Bioethics Forum Essay
Why I Support Age-Related Rationing of Ventilators for Covid-19 Patients
As a 71-year-old bioethicist, I consider rationing mechanical ventilation based on age to be one morally relevant criterion during the Covid-19 pandemic.Read “Why I Support Age-Related Rationing of Ventilators for Covid-19 Patients”
HASTINGS CENTER REPORT
Responding to COVID-19: How to Navigate a Public Health Emergency Legally and Ethically
Lawrence O. Gostin, Eric A. Friedman, and Sarah A. Wetter [This article appears in the Hastings Center Report, March-April 2020] Few novel or emerging infectious diseases have posed such vital...Read “Responding to COVID-19: How to Navigate a Public Health Emergency Legally and Ethically”
Bioethics Forum Essay
We Have Met the Enemy and It Is Us
In its early days, bioethics emphasized patient autonomy in the doctor-patient relationship. But patient autonomy is not the be-all and end-all principle to follow in all health care settings. Especially in lethal, airborne infectious disease pandemics.COVID-19
Responding to Covid-19 as a Regional Public Health Challenge: Preliminary Guidelines for Regional Collaboration Involving Hospitals
Bioethics Forum Essay
Treating Gun Violence as a Public Health Threat: Not Exactly What We Meant
This week, the United States saw two momentous public health events: one million deaths attributed to Covid and the 198th mass shooting of the year. Both the pandemic and gun shootings are threats to public health that are not being adequately addressed.Read “Treating Gun Violence as a Public Health Threat: Not Exactly What We Meant”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Denying Ventilators to Covid-19 Patients with Prior DNR Orders is Unethical
Previously-stated DNR status would seem irrelevant to ventilator allocation, and yet some existing and proposed guidelines for triage during a public health emergency list DNR status in the list of criteria for excluding patients from getting ventilators or other life-saving health care. This approach is in direct opposition to the generally agreed-upon goal of maximizing the number of survivors, and could result in confusion and public mistrust of the health care system.Read “Denying Ventilators to Covid-19 Patients with Prior DNR Orders is Unethical”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Unresolved Grief is Eating Away at Us
In most ways, 2023 was a return to normal. Schools were fully back in person; hybrid work was old hat; travel rebounded. But people are easily agitated. I think in our desire to regain a sense of normalcy we have not grieved properly for the losses and hardships of the past four years.Bioethics Forum Essay
I Was Never “Just” a Visitor
Caregivers are not visitors. Hospital policies that restrict visits from family caregivers can harm patients.Bioethics Forum Essay
Omicron, the Legacy of Renée Fox, and the Uncertain Practice of Medicine
Like the pandemic, uncertainty, growing confidence, and the return of doubt come in waves. The Omicron variant is just the latest twist in this plot.Read “Omicron, the Legacy of Renée Fox, and the Uncertain Practice of Medicine”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Vaccinated and Still Isolated: The Ethics of Overprotecting Nursing Home Residents
The pandemic is not over, but light is beginning to crest the horizon. Vaccination rates, especially among older adults and their caregivers, are rising. As we begin to relax physical...Read “Vaccinated and Still Isolated: The Ethics of Overprotecting Nursing Home Residents”
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Transcript: Critical Moment in Bioethics
This transcript automatically generated by machine and may contain errors Dani Pacia (she/her): hi everyone on behalf of the Hastings Center welcome to a critical moment in bioethics a webinar...Bioethics Forum Essay
Warp Speed Bioethics
It takes less time than ever to publish papers. But is quality sacrificed by doing bioethics at warp speed, especially during the Covid pandemic?Page
Transcript | Vaccine Access, Vaccine Hesitancy: Challenges to Herd Immunity
A HASTINGS CENTER CONVERSATION WITH RHEA BOYD, MAYA GOLDENBERG, AND MILDRED SOLOMON The Hastings Center hosted “Vaccine Access, Vaccine Hesitancy: Challenges to Herd Immunity,” an online discussion of the ethical issues related...Read “Transcript | Vaccine Access, Vaccine Hesitancy: Challenges to Herd Immunity”
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Ethics and Abortion
Selected resources from The Hastings Center. Bioethics Briefings: AbortionA central philosophical question in the abortion debate concerns the moral status of the embryo and fetus. Public opinion on abortion falls...Bioethics Forum Essay
Responding to Zika: Ethical Challenges of Zoonotic Diseases
The World Health Organization will hold an emergency committee meeting on the pandemic reemergence of Zika virus and the explosive increase in reported cases of congenital microcephaly in Brazil possibly linked to...Read “Responding to Zika: Ethical Challenges of Zoonotic Diseases”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Moving On from Covid? Immunocompromised People Can’t
The best case scenario for immunocompromised people like me would be universal masking in all public spaces. But I am willing to compromise.Bioethics Forum Essay
Rugged American Individualism is a Myth, and It’s Killing Us
The American myth of rugged individualism, which often means “pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps,” is outdated, was never completely accurate. It is on full display during the coronavirus pandemic, contributing to cases and deaths.Read “Rugged American Individualism is a Myth, and It’s Killing Us”
Bioethics Forum Essay
On Being a Foster Parent During Covid
I knew that being a foster parent would be demanding, but I was unprepared for the extent of the challenges, which were exacerbated by the pandemic.Bioethics Forum Essay
C.D.C.’s Latest Mask Guidance: Science, Politics, and Public Health
The C.D.C.'s latest policy guidance that people who have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus virus no longer need to wear face masks indoors gets the science right, but policymaking wrong.Read “C.D.C.’s Latest Mask Guidance: Science, Politics, and Public Health”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Parents, Covid, and Trauma-Informed Choices
As the parent of a child under 5 years old, I am worried about what lies ahead for kids and Covid-19. The more contagious Delta variant is widely circulating, infecting...Bioethics Forum Essay
Instead of Vaccine Passports, Let’s Push for Global Justice in Vaccine Access
In Costa Rica, where I live, only 24% of the population has received at least one vaccine dose because we have received very small amounts of vaccines. The Costa Rican president suggested that every person who can travel to the U.S. to get the jab, should do it. Vaccine tourism, then, seems to be another promising business opportunity for the powerful countries that have accumulated vaccines instead of redistributing them soon and fairly.Read “Instead of Vaccine Passports, Let’s Push for Global Justice in Vaccine Access”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Who Will Be There to Care If There Are No More Nurses?
The pandemic has laid bare the significant shortcomings of a health system rooted in an unsustainable financial model that exploits the physical and emotional labor of its nurses.Read “Who Will Be There to Care If There Are No More Nurses?”
Bioethics Forum Essay
The CDC’s Misguided Medical Masking Policy
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s revised guidelines have done away with universal masking at health care facilities, making masking optional if community Covid transmission isn’t high. It’s the latest attempt of public health officials to adapt their guidance to meet the country’s fatigued sensibilities. Some patients will be at risk.Bioethics Forum Essay
DACA at 10: More, Please
DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, has been with us for 10 years. Granting a work permit and a renewable two-year stay of deportation to undocumented youth who have grown up in the United States turned out to have enormous benefits for them and for our nation.Hastings Center News
Remembering Nancy Neveloff Dubler (1941-2024)
Nancy Neveloff Dubler, a Hastings Center fellow whose pathbreaking work shaped the field of medical ethics, died on April 14. Dubler worked on a wide range of bioethics topics, but...Bioethics Forum Essay
Housing an Aging Society: Five Priorities
While home and neighborhood environments matter to all people, older age brings particular considerations related to housing cost, safety and accessibility, neighborhood livability, links between the home and supportive services,...Bioethics Forum Essay
Islamic Ethics, Covid-19 Vaccination, and the Concept of Harm
Vaccine hesitancy is a concern around the world, but negative attitudes among Muslims in particular toward some coronavirus vaccines have been the focus of attention in the media. Some scholars in Asia recently issued fatwa against the Chinese Covid-19 vaccine. Media coverage has characterized the Muslim world as a hotspot for vaccine hesitancy, but experts point out biases in this coverage and explain the underlying reasons.Read “Islamic Ethics, Covid-19 Vaccination, and the Concept of Harm”
Hastings Center News
Q & A with Vardit Ravitsky
Welcome to The Hastings Center! You join the Center from the University of Montreal, where you were a professor in the bioethics program in the School of Public Health. You’re...Bioethics Forum Essay
Popular Culture and Bioethics: Severance
Severance, a popular Emmy Award-winning show streaming on Apple TV+, is a rich cultural artifact. It concerns a team of office workers at a morally questionable company that performs brain surgery on employees to sever the consciousness of their work and personal lives. The four of us were so taken by the show that we wrote these reflections on its important ethical themes.Page
Transcript | Re-Opening the Nation: What Values Should Guide Us?
Read “Transcript | Re-Opening the Nation: What Values Should Guide Us?”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself: Building Community During Covid
The opposition to mask and vaccine mandates transcends the issue of individual liberty.Read “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself: Building Community During Covid”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Studying Covid Vaccines in the Youngest Kids
Children have suffered both physical and mental illness during the pandemic. Nearly 200 children in the United States have died. Acute mental health crises increased during the pandemic. Getting children immunized is the best way to get back to normal. We suggest an option that would permit children under 5 to be vaccinated without waiting until traditional prospective randomized trials can be completed.Bioethics Forum Essay
Back to School: The Covid Vaccination Choice
It’s back-to-school season in the United States, the third one during the Covid pandemic, but the first in which all schoolchildren are eligible for Covid vaccines. Yet fewer than a third of children ages 5 to 11 are fully vaccinated, while the percentage of those under 5 who have started–let alone completed–vaccination is in the low single digits. Why? The answers are complicated.In the Media
Children and the Pandemic: Hastings Scholars Make Three Policy Recommendations
While school districts around the country are planning whether and how to hold in-person classes in September, “society’s commitment to children has gone largely unmentioned,” write Hastings Center research scholars Carolyn P. Neuhaus and Josephine Johnston in The Hill.Read “Children and the Pandemic: Hastings Scholars Make Three Policy Recommendations”
From Bioethics Briefings
Disaster Planning and Public Health
Framing the Issue Disasters happen. Coping with them and recovering and rebuilding afterward are nothing new. Systematic, evidence-based advance planning and preparedness are more novel, however, and seeing disasters as...Bioethics Forum Essay
Please Don’t (Need to) Use My Work
I helped develop guidelines for the ethical allocation of scarce resources during a public health emergency, such as a pandemic..I hope my contributions have an impact. I especially hope to see my work used since it emphasizes the perspectives of minority and underserved communities, who tend to have less voice in health policy. But now I find myself dreading the use of my work.Bioethics Forum Essay
Pathogens and Humans
In a 1988 essay on pandemics, Nobel laureate Joshua Lederberg wrote, “We have no guarantee that the natural evolutionary competition of viruses with the human species will always find ourselves the winner.”Bioethics Forum Essay
Beyond the Covid Crisis—A New Social Contract with Public Health
Covid-19 is teaching us the stern lesson that economic well-being and health justice are two sides of the same coin. To weather pandemics and restore the social contact that economic life demands, we need to sign a new social contract with public health.Read “Beyond the Covid Crisis—A New Social Contract with Public Health”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Living through the Pandemic in New Zealand
In New Zealand we have been saved from the worst devastations of Covid-19 by a firm government, courage and care for one another, and our geographic “moat.” With the recent minor surge of cases, our government has, once again, encouraged us to respond as a team of 5 million. We have been guided by the slogan “Be kind.”Bioethics Forum Essay
Prioritize Health Care Workers for Ventilators? Not So Fast
In places where Covid-19 is increasing – and in preparation for a possible second wave of the pandemic-- hospitals are preparing to triage critical resources if necessary. Some are prioritizing health care workers for ventilators. We think this is a mistake.Read “Prioritize Health Care Workers for Ventilators? Not So Fast”
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Ethics and Clinical Trials
Selected resources from The Hastings Center. Bioethics Briefings: Clinical Trials Clinical trials are specifically designed to test the safety and efficacy of interventions in humans and are preceded by laboratory...Bioethics Forum Essay
Should Covid Vaccination Status Be Used to Make Triage Decisions?
As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to strain health systems’ capacity to provide adequate care for critically ill patients, should patients’ vaccination status be considered in making triage decisions? This question sparked debate recently after the leak of an internal memo of the North Texas Mass Critical Care Guideline Task Force that proposed using patients’ Covid-19 vaccination status as a factor to assign intensive care beds.Read “Should Covid Vaccination Status Be Used to Make Triage Decisions?”
Hastings Center News
Hastings Center Resumes Visiting Scholars Program
The Hastings Center’s longstanding visiting scholars program, which was halted during the Covid-19 pandemic, is back. Applications for stays are now open. The program enables scholars from institutions around the...COVID-19
Ethics Resources for Conducting Research in Public Health Emergencies
Read “Ethics Resources for Conducting Research in Public Health Emergencies”
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TRANSCRIPT: Unpacking Neglected Factors to Ensure Impact
February 7, 2023 Transcription by machine — may contain errors Elizabeth Lanphier Want to welcome you to today’s second installment of Bioethics with Bigger Impact. I’m Elizabeth Lanphier. I’m a coeditor of...Read “TRANSCRIPT: Unpacking Neglected Factors to Ensure Impact”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Overcoming Covid Vaccine Hesitancy Among Minnesota’s Somali Muslims
When Covid-19 vaccines first became available last year, Somali Muslims in Minnesota--the largest Somali Muslim population in North America-- were fearful and, consequently, their vaccination rate was low and their Covid-19 rate was high. But health professionals and community representatives worked together to understand and overcome their vaccine hesitancy.Read “Overcoming Covid Vaccine Hesitancy Among Minnesota’s Somali Muslims”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Bioethics in the Second Cold War
Bioethics is an integral part of the liberal international order intentionally developed after World War II. Following the Russian war on Ukraine there is every reason to believe that the set of norms and institutions that preserved peace in Europe through the first Cold War will be revised according to new assumptions that will structure international relations in a second Cold War.Bioethics Forum Essay
Capitalist Philanthropy and Vaccine Imperialism
The commitments made by the wealthiest countries to share Covid vaccines and funding for international cooperation mechanisms are crucial, but insufficient. They reflect the “securitization of health,” a 21st century phenomenon whereby states turn health issues into national security issues.From Bioethics Briefings
Racism and Health Equity
Framing the Issue Racism has been declared a threat to public health by public health and medical organizations like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Medical...Page
Covid-19 Ethical Framework and Supplements
Ethical Framework for Health Care Institutions Responding to Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19); Guidelines for Institutional Ethics Services Responding to Covid-19:March 16, 2020An ethically sound framework for health care during public...Bioethics Forum Essay
Lessons from Covid-19: Why Treating Sick Patients is Bad Business for Hospitals
Hospitals in the United States are losing money taking care of patients with Covid-19. The pandemic casts a harsh spotlight on the misallocation of health care resources in the U.S.Read “Lessons from Covid-19: Why Treating Sick Patients is Bad Business for Hospitals”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Quality of Life? Suffering? Covid-19 Intensifies Challenges in Discussing Life-Sustaining Treatment
The pandemic magnified the inherent difficulty and stress of conversations involving life-sustaining treatment by forcing clinicians and patients to engage in life-altering discussions via telephone and video conference, restricting nonverbal communication and eye contact, and eliminating the benefit of simply having another person nearby in time of crisis.Hastings Center News
Hastings Center President Speaks on Systemic Racism, Health Inequities, and Covid-19
Read “Hastings Center President Speaks on Systemic Racism, Health Inequities, and Covid-19”
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Covid-19 Update: Essential Resources on Immigrant Health
Updated December 12, 2020 The novel coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the vulnerabilities of low-wage immigrants to viral infection and severe Covid-19 illness. This public health emergency compounds the social (non-medical)...Read “Covid-19 Update: Essential Resources on Immigrant Health”
Bioethics Forum Essay
How Many Covid-19 Deaths Should We Accept?
President Biden recently declared that the Covid-19 “pandemic is over.” Some public health experts agreed with this assessment; others disagreed. What cannot be disputed is that nearly 12,000 Americans have...Page
New in the Hastings Center Report: Crisis Standards of Care, September-October 2021 issue
Press release HCR September-October 2021 LH New in the Hastings Center Report: Crisis Standards of Care, September-October 2021 issue As Covid spreads and leaves intensive care units at or near capacity...Read “New in the Hastings Center Report: Crisis Standards of Care, September-October 2021 issue”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Immigrants, Health Inequities, and Social Citizenship in Covid-19 Response and Recovery
Read “Immigrants, Health Inequities, and Social Citizenship in Covid-19 Response and Recovery”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Covid Vaccine Patent Waivers are for Health Sovereignty
The United States, Russia, and China support temporary patent waivers for Covid vaccines. The waivers, which need support from other countries, would likely save lives in low- and middle-income countries.Read “Covid Vaccine Patent Waivers are for Health Sovereignty”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Making Vaccine Appointments Is Tearing Us Apart
The Covid-19 vaccine rollout is currently a hub of individual, sociopolitical, and ethical activity. As we watch the numbers of daily doses administered rising, we may feel engaged in a...From Bioethics Briefings
Conflict of Interest in Biomedical Research and Clinical Practice
Framing the Issue Conflict of interest is a broad term to describe situations where professional judgement risks being compromised by secondary interests. Research and clinical care both involve judgment about...Read “Conflict of Interest in Biomedical Research and Clinical Practice”
Hastings Center News
Crisis Standards of Care: New in the Hastings Center Report
As Covid spreads and leaves intensive care units at or near capacity in several states, some regions have approved crisis standards of care, which involve health care rationing. The latest...Read “Crisis Standards of Care: New in the Hastings Center Report”
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TRANSCRIPT: Anti-Black Racism, Health & Health Care
This transcript was generated by computer and may contain errors. Aashna Lal, The Hastings Center Thank you all for joining us today. Welcome to anti-black racism, health and health care....Bioethics Forum Essay
Why We Need a Covid-19 Commission
Congress recently announced plans for an independent commission to investigate the facts and causes of the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. This 1/6 Commission is to be modelled after the 9/11 Commission. A national commission to investigate the disaster that the Covid-19 virus has caused in America must also be launched.Bioethics Forum Essay
Quiet Quitting Undermines Human Flourishing
Quiet quitting, the trend in which people do only the minimum in their jobs, has captured attention in the news and on social media. More than half of U.S. workers are quiet quitting, according to a recent Gallup poll, and most of them are in their 20s and 30s. I was discussing this trend with my bioethics colleagues, and we considered the ethical implications for people’s well-being.Hastings Center News
Health Care Professionals’ Burnout During Covid
Frontline physicians who cared for Covid-19 patients during the first wave of the pandemic in New York City and New Orleans reported multiple factors that contributed to their occupational stress...Bioethics Forum Essay
COVID: Collective of Voices in Distress
Bioethics Forum Essay
Flattening the Curve, Then What?
Bioethics Forum Essay
A Covid-19 Side Effect: Virulent Resurgence of Ageism
Of all the “isms,” ageism is arguably the hardest to address because old age neither a valued stage of life nor an identity that many claim. The coronavirus pandemic may have made that effort even harder.Read “A Covid-19 Side Effect: Virulent Resurgence of Ageism”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Coronavirus and the Crisis of Trust
Influenza and coronavirus cause similar symptoms probably through similar modes of transmission. What is unique about coronavirus is that misinformation, missteps, conspiracies, and cover-ups have left their mark on public trust.Bioethics Forum Essay
Resisting Public Health Measures, Then and Now
One of the most surprising aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic for those of us who teach the history of public health is how unwilling many Americans have been to adopt health measures to protect others. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, tens of millions of Americans traveled, despite the fact that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urged them to stay home and the overall death rate from the coronavirus is approaching 300,000. Should recent events make us revisit aspects of the history of public health? And how can these stories inform future public health efforts during pandemics?BIOETHICS & EQUITY
A Perilous Moment for Our Nation
Bioethics Forum Essay
Post-Covid Bioethics
Covid-19 is making bioethics more relevant than ever. The ethical dilemmas raised by the pandemic are urgent and heart-wrenching. Who should get a ventilator if we do not have enough? How can we protect the most vulnerable from discrimination in the face of difficult triage decisions? How do we weigh individual liberty against the public interest of keeping people confined? While such questions are not new for bioethicists, the need to answer them urgently, globally, and in very concrete settings, creates unprecedented circumstances. Is this an opportunity for bioethics to learn some important lessons? What should post-Covid bioethics look like?Bioethics Forum Essay
False Hope About Coronavirus Treatments
While patients can and do recover from coronavirus infections, there are currently no approved treatments that are known to work against COVID-19.Bioethics Forum Essay
Reckoning with Anti-Black Racism in Bioethics: Key Takeaways
The field of bioethics has a moral responsibility to respond to the continued racial and health inequities confronting Black, Indigenous, and other people of color. Along with several colleagues, we formed an antiracism task force to interrogate that moral responsibility. Here are key takeaways from a recent panel discussion that we organized.Read “Reckoning with Anti-Black Racism in Bioethics: Key Takeaways”
Bioethics Forum Essay
When to Reopen the Nation is an Ethics Question—Not Only a Scientific One
As the world reels from the Covid-19 pandemic, two things have become very clear: the health impacts of the disease are devastating, but the aggressive social distancing policies currently being used to flatten the curve also have serious costs. As a result, the question of when and how to reopen the nation is on everyone’s mind. Do we open quickly in an effort to kick-start the economy? Or do we remain under lockdown as long as possible to stop the spread of the virus?Read “When to Reopen the Nation is an Ethics Question—Not Only a Scientific One”
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Securing Health in a Troubled Time
Forty million people live in poverty in the United States, a reality at odds with our great wealth and espoused principles. Health inequities, including dramatically decreased life expectancies and severe...Bioethics Forum Essay
Undocumented Immigrants and Covid-19 Vaccination
Willingness to be vaccinated is not the only factor that may reduce vaccination rates. Fear is a powerful deterrent for individuals in hidden populations, especially undocumented immigrants. Even if their work or other circumstances place them at high risk of infection, many would be unlikely to risk the consequences of coming forward to be vaccinated.Bioethics Forum Essay
Committing to Fight Racism
We have reached a very sad, painful moment in the United States. It feels like a cascade of calamities, one compounding the next. An infectious disease pandemic that we cannot yet cure has precipitated an economic crisis. An episode of police brutality against a black man has added the name George Floyd to a long list of victims of unfair policing practices in black communities. Bioethicists have not been doing enough in our professional capacities to actively denounce or address the persistent problems of structural racism. We invite our fellow bioethics colleagues to join us in candid, uncomfortable conversations about what we can and should be doing differently.Our Team
Nancy Berlinger
Nancy Berlinger is a senior research scholar at The Hastings Center and a Hastings Center fellow. Her training is in the humanities. Her current scholarship and empirical research focus on...Bioethics Forum Essay
Ethics Supports Seeking Population Immunity, Not Immunizing Priority Groups
Vaccine allocation guidelines that prioritize people at greatest risk of Covid-19 require considerable administrative work (sometimes taking weeks). This is creating a bottleneck that has resulted in doses stuck in freezers not in arms. There's a better, more ethical way to allocate vaccines.Read “Ethics Supports Seeking Population Immunity, Not Immunizing Priority Groups”
Hastings Center News
America’s Bioethicists and Health Care Leaders: Government Must Use Federal Powers To Fight COVID-19
Nearly 1,400 of the nation’s most prominent bioethicists and health leaders signed an urgent letter to Congress and the White House, imploring the U.S. government to immediately use its federal power and funds to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic as a matter of moral imperative. The petition was developed by Mildred Solomon, president of The Hastings Center, and Lawrence Gostin, a Hastings Fellow and director of the O’Neill Center for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University.Bioethics Forum Essay
The Price of Going Back to Work Too Soon
Bioethics Forum Essay
Human Challenge Studies for Covid-19 Vaccine: Questions about Benefits and Risks
Experts in infectious disease and public health warn that the Covid-19 pandemic will be with us until there is an effective vaccine, possibly 12 to 18 months in the future. This situation has given rise to calls for human challenge studies, in which healthy volunteers are injected with an experimental vaccine and then infected with the disease to test the vaccine’s efficacy. Is this ethically justifiable?Read “Human Challenge Studies for Covid-19 Vaccine: Questions about Benefits and Risks”
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Securing Health in a Troubled Time
Bioethics Forum Essay
“You Can See Your Loved One Now.” Can Visitor Restrictions During Covid Unduly Influence End-of-Life Decisions?
One of the factors considered most important by dying patients and their families is the opportunity to be together. For many of our hospitalized patients in palliative care, the presence of loved ones at the bedside is such a given that we don’t even address it explicitly in advance care planning discussions. So, it comes as no surprise that Covid- 19-related visitor restrictions affecting hospitalized patients might impact end-of-life decision-making, potentially in ways that are ethically problematic.Page
The Hastings Center Bioethics Timeline
“Bioethics” has been defined in several different ways. Most broadly, it is the interdisciplinary study of ethical, legal, and social issues arising in the life sciences and health care. Though...Bioethics Forum Essay
Global Allocation of Coronavirus Vaccines
A Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech has received emergency authorization in the United States and has been authorized in the countries, and a vaccine by Moderna is likely to be authorized soon. In spite of this good news, at least for the first couple of years, Covid-19 vaccines will be a scarce resource. Because low-income countries are likely to lose out in the scramble to get access to them, there have been calls for global solidarity. While equitable allocation of vaccines around the world would be ideal, it is unrealistic as a near-term goal.Bioethics Forum Essay
The FDA and the Moral Distinction Between Killing and Letting Die
Why is the FDA dragging its feet in approving Covid vaccines for children under 12? Justifications lack moral weight.Read “The FDA and the Moral Distinction Between Killing and Letting Die”
Bioethics Forum Essay
After the Surge: Prioritizing the Backlog of Delayed Hospital Procedures
The rewards of social distancing are beginning to accrue in former hotspots such as Seattle, the New York metropolitan area, and the San Francisco Bay Area, where the number of new Covid-19 cases requiring hospitalization is declining. Assuming the rewards hold in the face of pressures to reopen the economy, hospitals will now face challenges of reopening their own nonpandemic services for patients whose elective surgeries and other procedures were postponed. Which patients should get priority?Read “After the Surge: Prioritizing the Backlog of Delayed Hospital Procedures”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Lawsuits of Last Resort: Employees Fight for Safe Workplaces during Covid-19
As more workplaces open up, a seldom-used legal action is being taken against employers charged with inadequately protecting employees from the coronavirus: public nuisance lawsuits.Read “Lawsuits of Last Resort: Employees Fight for Safe Workplaces during Covid-19”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Three Lessons from Leah
Leah Zallman's meticulous research helps us all to tell the story of what immigrants give to this nation and what they should receive from this nation.Page
Ethics and the Family Caregiving
Selected resources from The Hastings Center. Bioethics Briefings: Family Caregiving The central philosophical question in family caregiving is how to best support infrastructures of care in times where changes in...Bioethics Forum Essay
The Place in “Aging in Place”: Housing Equity in Late Life
Most older Americans want to age “in place” – in the community, not an institution. But there's a poor fit between our nation’s housing stock and our aging demographics.Read “The Place in “Aging in Place”: Housing Equity in Late Life”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Vaccination Discrimination Goes Against Nursing Ethics
Some health care providers are prioritizing patients who are fully vaccinated against Covid-19 over those who are unvaccinated. This is unethical.Read “Vaccination Discrimination Goes Against Nursing Ethics”
Hastings Center News
New Recommendations Address Crisis of Physician Stress
A new set of 12 recommendations for hospitals and health care institutions addresses moral stress in clinical practice and the ways that it impedes good care. The recommendations for hospital...Read “New Recommendations Address Crisis of Physician Stress”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Clinicians Have a Moral Duty to Care for All Patients–Including Lockdown Protesters
Protesters questioning the ongoing need for lockdown measures aimed at controlling Covid19 are marching to make their concerns known, in some cases with arms and other military paraphernalia. Some ethicists think these protectors should sign a pledge to forego scarce medical care in the name of their political ideas. We disagree.Read “Clinicians Have a Moral Duty to Care for All Patients–Including Lockdown Protesters”
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New Recommendations Address Crisis of Physician Stress
January 18, 2023 – A new set of 12 recommendations for hospitals and health care institutions addresses moral stress in clinical practice and the ways that it impedes good care....Read “New Recommendations Address Crisis of Physician Stress”
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Support Our Work
Bioethics Forum Essay
We Need International Medical Graduates to Help Fight Covid-19. Immigration Policies Keep Them Away
Bioethics Forum Essay
Ethical Responsibility in Publishing Research Results on Covid-19 Treatments
There is little doubt about the urgent need for Covid-19 treatment. But premature publication of definitive recommendations based on inappropriate conclusions grounded in scant, hastily-acquired data serve only at best to confuse and at worst mislead at a time when tensions are high and need for help is great.Read “Ethical Responsibility in Publishing Research Results on Covid-19 Treatments”
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Request for Proposals from Fundraising Consultants
The Hastings Center invites proposals from fundraising consultants experienced in leading feasibility studies and strategically planning and advising nonprofit organizations in conducting endowment-focused campaigns. Fundraising consultants who identify as members...Bioethics Forum Essay
We Can’t Forget the Nation’s Other Epidemic
Covid isn’t merely overshadowing the drug overdose crisis—it’s directly worsening it.Hastings Center News
The Hastings Center Produces Guidance for Ethical Practice in Responding to COVID-19
The Hastings Center has developed a resource for health care institutions and institutional ethics services to support leadership and practice during the novel coronavirus public health emergency and in the care of patients with COVID-19.The Hastings Center convened an expert advisory group to meet the need for a practical resource to support institutional preparedness and supplement public health and clinical practice guidance on COVID-19.Read “The Hastings Center Produces Guidance for Ethical Practice in Responding to COVID-19”
Bioethics Forum Essay
What Warrants Religious Exemption from Covid Vaccine Mandates?
Faced with mandatory Covid vaccination, students and employees have appealed to religion as grounds for exemption. This latest conscience war within our culture wars presents a minefield of legal and philosophical complexities for states and health care systems.Read “What Warrants Religious Exemption from Covid Vaccine Mandates?”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Bioethicists and Health Care Institutions Must Act Against Florida’s Anti-Immigrant Law
Florida’s new anti-immigrant law, SB 1718, has escaped widespread notice, despite the way it will undermine the mission—and core identity--of not-for-profit hospitals as caring institutions that promote the health of the community. Bioethics and health care institutions must take action.Read “Bioethicists and Health Care Institutions Must Act Against Florida’s Anti-Immigrant Law”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Xenotransplantation: Three Areas of Concern
News of the first transplant of a pig’s heart into a human raises hope that the procedure could one day help alleviate the shortage of organs. But before we forge ahead with xenotransplantation trials, we should be concerned about several issues: the potential to spread pathogens, exploitation of human research participants, and animal welfare.Page
PRESS RELEASE: 08.15.12 Study Finds Pregnant Women Support Some Participation in Research
(Garrison, NY) A new study involving pregnant women who enrolled in randomized vaccine trials challenges the longstanding reluctance to conduct research with pregnant women because of ethical concerns about the...Read “PRESS RELEASE: 08.15.12 Study Finds Pregnant Women Support Some Participation in Research”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Accepting the Challenge: Covid Vaccine Challenge Trials Can Be Ethically Justified
The Covid-19 pandemic is unlikely to end until there is a safe, effective, and widely distributed vaccine. How soon can researchers achieve this goal? The answer largely depends on which strategies researchers are willing to adopt. One potential strategy is to conduct human challenge studies, in which researchers give an experimental vaccine to healthy volunteers and then test—or “challenge”—the vaccine by purposely exposing volunteers to the virus. Although a growing number of voices are calling on researchers to employ this strategy, the proposal is generating a heated debate about the ethics of such research.Read “Accepting the Challenge: Covid Vaccine Challenge Trials Can Be Ethically Justified”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Nope. A Covid-19 Travel Pass isn’t Just like the Yellow Card.
Citing the Yellow Card as precedent for Covid-19 travel passes that exempt those with proof of vaccination from testing and quarantine mandates when crossing certain borders is an erroneous policy assumption that could prolong the pandemic and imperil global health.Read “Nope. A Covid-19 Travel Pass isn’t Just like the Yellow Card.”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Advancing Maternal Health Equity with Data Transparency: The Case of Texas
Texas has delayed the release of the full report of the most up-to-date data on maternal health, further threatening the health of marginalized women, children, and families.Read “Advancing Maternal Health Equity with Data Transparency: The Case of Texas”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Responding to Ebola: Organizational Ethics, Frontline Perspectives
Beyond crucial questions of fair access to scarce supplies of the experimental drug ZMapp and to other potentially effective drugs to treat Ebola, commentators from bioethics, public health, journalism, and...Read “Responding to Ebola: Organizational Ethics, Frontline Perspectives”
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What Is Bioethics?
Bioethics is the interdisciplinary study of ethical issues arising in the life sciences, health care, technology, and health and science policy. It examines the ethical, legal, and social implications of such...Bioethics Forum Essay
Responding to Ebola: Selected Commentaries on Key Ethical Questions
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is the largest and deadliest on record, and the crisis is evolving rapidly. More than 2,200 people have been infected in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, and...Read “Responding to Ebola: Selected Commentaries on Key Ethical Questions”
COVID-19
COVID-19: Supporting Ethical Care and Responding to Moral Distress in a Public Health Emergency
Bioethics Forum Essay
COVID-19 and the Global Ethics Freefall
Since the initial outbreak in Wuhan last December, the national and global responses to COVID-19 have been in ethics freefall.Page
Transcript: New Ethical Questions and 21st Century Genomics
Read “Transcript: New Ethical Questions and 21st Century Genomics”
Hastings Center News
Impact of Racism on Health Framed in New Briefing
A new primer frames the threat racism poses to public health, stating that health equity in general is compromised when any group doesn’t have the resources needed for health. “Racism...Bioethics Forum Essay
Disabusing the Disability Critique of the New York State Task Force Report on Ventilator Allocation
I am a member of the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law and helped write its 2015 guidelines on the allocation of ventilators during a public health emergency. The position outlined by the Task Force report has been a point of confusion in the media. I don't believe that the Task Force recommendations discriminate against people with disabilities.Bioethics Forum Essay
Health Equity Without Ethics Perpetuates Marginalization
To eliminate a quality metric for clinical ethics is at odds with good clinical practice and it reinforces structural inequality.Read “Health Equity Without Ethics Perpetuates Marginalization”
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Solomon to Step Down as Hastings Center President
(JULY 18, 2022) – Hastings Center President Mildred Z. Solomon announced today that she plans to step down in June 2023, marking 11 years of leadership at the pioneering ethics...COVID-19
Could the Common Cold Help Stop Covid-19? We Need to Know–Now.
In an essay published in Scientific American, we call for immediate and intensive research into the possibility that exposure to one of the coronaviruses that cause the common cold could decrease the severity of Covid-19, and could be leveraged to expand what’s been called “pre-existing” immunity to the disease by deliberate transmission of common cold coronaviruses. Here, we expand on our proposal.Read “Could the Common Cold Help Stop Covid-19? We Need to Know–Now.”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Say Their Names: Unclaimed Bodies and Untrustworthiness in Medical Science
A recent NBC investigative series titled “Dealing the Dead" revealed that thousands of unclaimed bodies were used by the University of North Texas Health Science Center for scientific research and medical education, and to generate profit. These findings raise important ethical questions around the need for ongoing transparency and accountability concerning the use of the deceased in medical research and education.Read “Say Their Names: Unclaimed Bodies and Untrustworthiness in Medical Science”
Bioethics Forum Essay
The Ethics of Treating the President
Concerns about the health status of sitting presidents of the United States can raise significant questions in medical ethics, notably regarding the scope of a president’s right to confidentiality and of the public’s need—or right—to know about the president’s health, the role and responsibilities of the president’s physician, and the appropriateness of offering unapproved treatments. These concerns are heightened during the global pandemic for which there is no cure or vaccine and limited information about treatments.Bioethics Forum Essay
Covid-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in Rural Communities? Checking Our Assumptions
As access to vaccines increases, the popular press reports waning demand for vaccines in rural residents and points to vaccine hesitancy. But there may be other reasons why doses distributed to rural areas remain unclaimed.Read “Covid-19 Vaccine Hesitancy in Rural Communities? Checking Our Assumptions”
Hastings Center News
12 Outstanding Scholars Recognized for Work in Ethics of Disability, Transplantation, Mental Health Care, and Other Areas
The Hastings Center is pleased to announce the election of 12 new fellows. Hastings Center fellows are a group of more than 200 individuals of outstanding accomplishment whose work has...SPECIAL EVENT
Re-Opening the Nation: What Values Should Guide Us?
Bioethics Forum Essay
Race, Research, and Bioethics: The Chapatis Studies
New inquiry examines ethics of 1960's experiments involving Punjabi immigrants in the United Kingdom and radioactive chapatis.Bioethics Forum Essay
Keep Politics Out of State Medical Policy
State medical boards and other government-appointed health officials have an obligation to follow evidence-based medicine to frame their opinions and regulations. However, there is disturbing evidence that, in some cases, political ideology is guiding health policy.Page
Ethics of Nature, Human Nature, and Biotechnology
Selected resources from The Hastings Center. Bioethics Briefings: Nature, Human Nature, and Biotechnology Moral views about nature—claims that nature or a natural state of affairs has value—are important in contemporary...Page
2023-2024 Sadler Scholars
Brooklyn Adams (she), PhD candidate in Epidemiology, UT-Houston Health Science Center, SPH About me: I am a first-generation college student who has long been passionate about health equity—and health inequity—in...Bioethics Forum Essay
Involuntary Withdrawal: A Bridge Too Far?
Despite its intended use as a treatment of last resort, some patients can remain on ECMO for weeks or months. And some are awake, alert, and capable of medical decision-making. RD was one such patient.Bioethics Forum Essay
Continuous Health Monitoring: Greater Self-Knowledge or TMI?
For millions of health-conscious Americans, digital technology has been a boon, providing increasingly sophisticated fitness trackers. Researchers speak excitedly about a new frontier of “continuous health monitoring,” with the potential to detect diseases and aliments in their incipient stages. It also raises a host of disturbing questions about health surveillance. Will these devices really empower us? Will they compromise us as autonomous individuals?Read “Continuous Health Monitoring: Greater Self-Knowledge or TMI?”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Balancing a Patient’s Autonomy Against Misinformation
With ventilator support, Ms. J would have a 50% chance of making a full recovery. Without it she would almost certainly die. That notwithstanding, Ms. J declined to consent to the ventilator.Read “Balancing a Patient’s Autonomy Against Misinformation”
Hastings Center News
The Hastings Center Announces Three Promotions
The Hastings Center is pleased to announce three staff promotions in the Advancement, Research, and Editorial Departments. The promotions are part of a reorganization meant to optimize the alignment of...Bioethics Forum Essay
Should Ethicists Be at the Table in Public Health Policy Deliberations?
In a recent article in The New England Journal of Medicine, Ezekiel Emanuel and colleagues clearly illustrate the relevance of ethical considerations to policy deliberations concerning public health emergencies. But do ethicists belong at the table?Read “Should Ethicists Be at the Table in Public Health Policy Deliberations?”
Hastings Center News
Rebuilding Trust in Health Care and Science
While confidence in many institutions has been declining for decades, the Covid-19 pandemic exposed the breakdown in trust in health care and science. A new Hastings Center special report on...Bioethics Forum Essay
Did Russia’s Most Influential Bioethicist Get a Coronavirus Vaccine?
Along with the announcement that his government had approved Sputnik V, the supposed Russian coronavirus vaccine, Vladimir Putin also indulged in a moment of paternal pride: Wanting to confirm his personal confidence in the vaccine, he mentioned that one of his daughters was among the early recipients. This raises a couple of intriguing questions: Which daughter was it? And why does it matter?Read “Did Russia’s Most Influential Bioethicist Get a Coronavirus Vaccine?”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Working Around the System: Vaccine Navigators and Vaccine Equity
Vaccine navigators have emerged as a response to the complexity of mass vaccination for Covid-19.Read “Working Around the System: Vaccine Navigators and Vaccine Equity”
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Public Trust in Science
HASTINGS CONVERSATIONS: A SERIES Dr. Anthony Fauci explored the ethical issues raised by the erosion of trust in science in a new virtual discussion hosted by The Hastings Center. The...From Our Journals
Equitably Sharing the Benefits and Burdens of Research: Covid‐19 Raises the Stakes
Read “Equitably Sharing the Benefits and Burdens of Research: Covid‐19 Raises the Stakes”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Ethicists as a Force for Institutional Change and Policies to Promote Equality
In his recent JAMA article, Donald Berwick eloquently describes what he termed the “moral determinants of health,” by which he meant a strong sense of social solidarity in which people in the United States would “depend on each other for securing the basic circumstances of healthy lives,” reflecting a “moral law within.” Berwick’s work should serve as a call to action for bioethicists and clinical ethicists to consider what they can do to be forces of broad moral change in their institutions.Read “Ethicists as a Force for Institutional Change and Policies to Promote Equality”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Do New York State’s Ventilator Allocation Guidelines Place Chronic Ventilator Users at Risk? Clarification Needed
There is a lack of clarity about the New York State Task Force guidelines on ventilator allocation. I believe disability rights concerns regarding the recommendations on chronic ventilator users are well-founded. This lack of clarity may cost lives.From Our Journals
Pregnant Women in Trials of Covid-19: A Critical Time to Consider Ethical Frameworks of Inclusion in Clinical Trials
Our Team
Josephine Johnston
Josephine Johnston is an expert on the ethical, legal, and policy implications of biomedical technologies, particularly as used in human reproduction, psychiatry, genetics, and neuroscience. In addition to numerous scholarly publications, her commentaries...From Our Journals
Advantages of Using Lotteries to Select Participants for High-Demand Covid-19 Treatment Trials
From Our Journals
Why Challenge Trials of SARS‐CoV‐2 Vaccines Could Be Ethical Despite Risk of Severe Adverse Events
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Special Reports
Special Reports to the Hastings Center Report are one venue in which the Center publishes the results of its research projects. Reports may be single-authored or collections of essays prepared...Bioethics Forum Essay
The Bioethics of Built Health Care Spaces
Around the world, an alarming percentage of Covid-19 deaths occurred in long-term care facilities. Some of these deaths may have been avoided by changes in design. It's time that bioethicists to take a closer look at the built health care environment.Bioethics Forum Essay
Before We Turn to Digital Contact Tracing for Covid, Remember Surveillance in the Sixties
Is it unrealistic to believe that phone apps for digital Covid contact tracing can be designed and regulated in ways that prevent the information they collect from being misused? It's worth remembering surveillance of Vietnam War protesters and Martin Luther King Jr.Read “Before We Turn to Digital Contact Tracing for Covid, Remember Surveillance in the Sixties”
Hastings Center News
Hastings Center Welcomes 24 New Fellows
The Hastings Center is pleased to announce the election of 24 new fellows. Hastings Center fellows are a group of more than 200 individuals of outstanding accomplishment whose work has...CALLAHAN LECTURE
Advancing Health Equity, and Community
An online event. February 9, 2021 at 12pm EST The Covid-19 pandemic has made longstanding, seemingly intractable inequities painfully visible. In addition to widespread suffering, African Americans and LatinX communities...Bioethics Forum Essay
Covid-19 Underscores Racial Disparity in Advance Directives
Older black Americans are half as likely as older whites to have advanced directives. My patient, a black man in his 70s,, first made his wishes known when he was in the hospital with Covid-19.Read “Covid-19 Underscores Racial Disparity in Advance Directives”
Hastings Center News
Health Equity Summit Recap
The Hastings Center and the Association of American Medical Colleges Center for Health Justice convened a two-day health equity summit called “Righting the Wrongs: Tackling Health Inequities” on January 19...Bioethics Forum Essay
Confusing Equity for Ethics Standards: Where Do We Go from Here?
The country’s leading hospital accreditation body recently eliminated the only performance standard that governed clinical ethics services. We argue the removal of the ethics standard requires additional review, and we have three recommendations.Read “Confusing Equity for Ethics Standards: Where Do We Go from Here?”
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Press Release: New in the Hastings Center Report: Ethical Challenges of the Opioid Crisis
The nationwide surge in drug abuse predates the Covid-19 pandemic but has risen to new highs during it. Causes of the crisis–physician prescribing habits and societal problems like poverty and...Read “Press Release: New in the Hastings Center Report: Ethical Challenges of the Opioid Crisis”
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Press Release: Health Equity, Racism, and This Moment in Time
PRESS RELEASE Contact: Susan Gilbert For Immediate Release 1-845-424-4040, ext. 244 gilberts@thehastingscenter.org Health Equity, Racism, and This Moment in TimeHastings Center online event next week The...Read “Press Release: Health Equity, Racism, and This Moment in Time”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Covid-19 and Deafness: Why the Protocols Fall Short
I am hard-of-hearing; I wear two hearing aids, and Covid-19 has made all forms of human interaction extraordinarily difficult.Bioethics Forum Essay
Public Reason, Public Schools, and Mask Mandates
In South Carolina, where I live, we are not just ignoring good arguments, but actually legislating on the basis of bad ones. The budget rule, Proviso 1.108, threatens the funding of schools that require masks.Our Team
Mildred Z. Solomon
Mildred Solomon has an international reputation for her research on, and advocacy for, wiser health care and science policy. She was President of The Hastings Center from 2012 to June...Bioethics Forum Essay
Public Health Officials and Gun Rights Advocates Must Work Together
In rural Virginia, where I live, there is strong support for the right to own and carry guns. For more than a decade, I have shared public health, mental health, and other scientific findings with the leadership of a statewide Second Amendment rights advocacy group, especially regarding the leading number of deaths by firearms: suicide. We do not agree on what firearms laws and policies might be or do to prevent suicides, but we have sustained our conversations and respectfully learned from each other’s point of view. Such conversations are hard to have.Read “Public Health Officials and Gun Rights Advocates Must Work Together”
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Delivering in Another Tumultuous Year
In 2021, as the country scrambled to decide how to allocate the Covid-19 vaccine, Hastings Center research scholar Nancy Berlinger led a national team to produce detailed guidance on vaccine ethics....Bioethics Forum Essay
Ethics of Placebo Controls in Coronavirus Vaccine Trials
Multiple candidate vaccines for coronavirus are being evaluated scientifically in a process of unprecedented speed, and thousands of individuals around the world have volunteered to participate in placebo-controlled phase III field trials. If, or when, one of these candidate vaccines is proved to be safe and effective and receives an emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration, will it continue to be ethical to enroll participants in other coronavirus trials that randomize half of them to a placebo?Read “Ethics of Placebo Controls in Coronavirus Vaccine Trials”
SPRING APPEAL
Support our Work
This has been a year like no other. For all of us. Challenges raised by the pandemic, including tragic reminders of the health inequities deeply embedded in our culture, underscore...Bioethics Forum Essay
From Gene-Edited Embryos to Covid: China Faces Regulatory and Ethical Challenges
Over the last two years, China has updated some regulations on human genetic engineering and assisted reproduction and established a national committee to guide and supervise bioethics nationwide. But there are legal gaps in some of the regulations and tension between competing values: the desire to encourage new research and to potentially inhibit it by imposing stricter ethics regulations.Read “From Gene-Edited Embryos to Covid: China Faces Regulatory and Ethical Challenges”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Detention, Dignity, and a Call for Bioethics Advocacy
Read “Detention, Dignity, and a Call for Bioethics Advocacy”
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Faculty
Sana Baban is a Project Manager and Research Assistant at The Hastings Center. She is interested in a wide range of bioethical issues, such as transplant ethics, immigration and refugee...Page
Anti-Ableist Medical Education: Meeting the Challenges
Hastings Center Issue Brief [download] Liz Bowen, Emily Cleveland-Manchanda, Peppar E.P. Cyr, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Susan Havercamp, Kristi Kirschner, Rebecca Kronk, Lisa M. Meeks, Peter Poullos, Zoie Clarise Sheets, Dorothy W....Read “Anti-Ableist Medical Education: Meeting the Challenges”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Covid is Surging. Most Young Children Are Still Unvaccinated
Children are returning to classrooms amid another wave of Covid cases, but some public health leaders have leaned into the message that “most of us” can ignore the continued presence of Covid by taking just “a few basic steps,” such as staying up to date with vaccinations. “Most of us,” however, does not include families with young babies, among other groups for whom these steps are unavailable or insufficient.Read “Covid is Surging. Most Young Children Are Still Unvaccinated”
From Bioethics Briefings
Environment, Ethics, and Human Health
Framing the Issue Many of the most challenging ethical questions of our time address interactions between human health and the environment: How can we balance protection for the environment with...Bioethics Forum Essay
Griefbots Are Here, Raising Questions of Privacy and Well-being
Hugh Culber is talking to his abuela, asking why her mofongo always came out better than his even though he is using her recipe. She replies that it never came...Read “Griefbots Are Here, Raising Questions of Privacy and Well-being”
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TRANSCRIPT: Should We Change “Chimeric” Human-Animal Research?
Transcript generated by machine and may contain errors Dani Paci Hi, all. Thank you for attending our webinar, Should We Change Chimeric Human Animal Research today. You will not be...Read “TRANSCRIPT: Should We Change “Chimeric” Human-Animal Research?”
Bioethics Forum Essay
An Evergreen Metaphor: Strachan Donnelley, Dan Callahan, and Environmental Ethics
The devastation of Hurricane Ida and the global threats of climate change are not on the fringe of bioethics. They call to mind the language of priority-setting typical of bioethics discourse. Who lives and who dies? What can be accomplished with prevention and more levees? And if more are built, how do we set priorities with limited resources?Read “An Evergreen Metaphor: Strachan Donnelley, Dan Callahan, and Environmental Ethics”
Hastings Center News
It’s Time to See Clinician Burnout for What It Is
“Clinician burnout is one of the most tenacious problems facing the contemporary health system. Recent years have seen a plethora of guidance on reducing burnout and improving health care workers’ well-being following the pandemic, but...Hastings Center News
Disinformation, Trust, and the Role of AI: Highlights of Our Event
Hastings Center President Vardit Ravitsky moderated a discussion with experts Reed Tuckson and Timothy Caulfield on disinformation, trust, and the role of AI, focusing on current and future threats to...Read “Disinformation, Trust, and the Role of AI: Highlights of Our Event”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Prioritizing the “1a”: Ethically Allocating Scarce Covid Vaccines to Health Care Workers
Beginning this week, guarded vehicles loaded with the first Covid-19 vaccine authorized in the United States are fanning out to hospitals across the country. In vaccine prioritization protocols health care workers, along with nursing home residents, make up phase “1a” – those who are first in line to be vaccinated. While much attention has been paid to who should come next, less is known about how hospitals are allocating vaccine doses among their staff. For many medical centers, the first shipments will only be enough to vaccinate a fraction of their workers. Who goes first within the “1a” category, and how are such decisions made?Read “Prioritizing the “1a”: Ethically Allocating Scarce Covid Vaccines to Health Care Workers”
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2022 — A Year of Results
In the early days of 2022, doctors transplanted a pig heart into a dying 57-year-old man, a medical first. Hastings Center research scholar Karen Maschke cautioned against rushing into animal-to-human...Hastings Center News
Ethics Guidance Released on Access to Drugs in COVID-19 Response
Read “Ethics Guidance Released on Access to Drugs in COVID-19 Response”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Should Clinicians Ask Hospitalized Covid Patients Why They Aren’t Vaccinated?
The role of doctors, nurses and other clinicians is to treat patients without passing judgment and to fulfill their fiduciary duty. However, the Covid-19 pandemic has muddled these obligations.Read “Should Clinicians Ask Hospitalized Covid Patients Why They Aren’t Vaccinated?”
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2021-22 Sadler Scholars
Sadler Scholars are a select group of doctoral students with research interests relevant to bioethics who are from racial and ethnic communities underrepresented in this field in the United States....Page
Overcoming Ableism in Medical and Nursing Education
Co-Principal Investigators: Erik Parens, Liz Bowen Investigator: Mildred Solomon Funder: The Macy Foundation Equitable health care for all is a bioethical imperative. And discrimination against people with disabilities—ableism—stands in the...Hastings Center News
Improving Access Key to Improving Health Equity
Improving access to health care is critical to improving health equity, stated health care leaders at a panel at the health equity summit sponsored by The Hastings Center earlier this...Bioethics Forum Essay
In Search of an Ethical Constraint on Hospital Revenue
Hospitals' tactics for maximizing revenue may be legal, but they raise ethical concerns.Read “In Search of an Ethical Constraint on Hospital Revenue”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Diversity and Solidarity in Response to Covid-19
Covid-19 imposes burdens in different—but very serious—ways on different individuals and groups. We see it in policies that address what to do in the face of shortages of scarce resources. We begin by challenging a common claim—that people with disabilities as a group will be harmed by triage policies that consider patients’ prospect of medical benefit.Bioethics Forum Essay
Human Plasma and Bioethics Nationalism
The procurement of human plasma as a potential therapy for Covid-19 is one of the latest examples of bioethics nationalism, defined by Jonathan Moreno in this blog as “distinct bioethics standards [which] are formally proclaimed as a matter of right by a sovereign state.” The race for a Covid cure pushes at the weak seams in the international liberal order in much the same way that Covid appears to be pushing at health care systems.Bioethics Forum Essay
Philanthropy is Not Enough: Oil and Gas Giants Must Consider Medical Ethics
Given the well-known environmental and health risks of oil and gas drilling, oil and gas giants that enter developing nations routinely offset these risks with charitable investments. Are these investments sufficient? Do the funds go where they are needed? Answering this question raises ethical issues that need greater attention.Read “Philanthropy is Not Enough: Oil and Gas Giants Must Consider Medical Ethics”
Bioethics Forum Essay
California U-Turn on Vaccine Mandates for Schoolchildren
The California legislature appears to have caved to pressure from opponents of a Covid vaccine mandate for schoolkids. I’d prefer to think of it as a wise and strategic retreat from a battle that mandate advocates could not win.Read “California U-Turn on Vaccine Mandates for Schoolchildren”
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PRESS RELEASE: 4-30-2013 The Ethics of Knowledge: When Should Hazardous Scientific Information be Made Public?
(Garrison, NY) How can we best address the potential threat posed by “dual use” research – scientific findings that can be used for good or evil? An article and two...Bioethics Forum Essay
A Secret to Restoring Trust in Vaccines
I am a bioethicist who became a local pro-vaccine activist in New York City to protect vulnerable communities from dangerous misinformation. I have spent much of my time trying to convince people not to believe what RFK Jr. has said.Bioethics Forum Essay
The Covid Threat No One Is Talking About: Wearing Scrubs in Public
The Covid-19 outbreak has forced health care providers, administrative officials, and the general public to each play their part in doing no harm to others. It may come as a surprise to many people, but health care workers may unknowingly spread Covid-19 in their communities simply by wearing scrubs in public.Read “The Covid Threat No One Is Talking About: Wearing Scrubs in Public”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Too Taboo to Contemplate? Refusing Covid Vaccination for Some People with Dementia
There are a whole lot of us who think that, if we had dementia and were unable to live independently, we would prefer death. The idea that someone suffering from dementia and confined to a nursing home might actually welcome death is apparently so taboo that it cannot be openly contemplated.Read “Too Taboo to Contemplate? Refusing Covid Vaccination for Some People with Dementia”
Bioethics Forum Essay
When It Comes to Rationing, Disability Rights Law Prohibits More than Prejudice
This week, the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Civil Rights resolved one of many civil rights complaints alleging discrimination on the basis of disability–the first instance of federal intervention to enforce civil rights laws in rationing protocols since the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis. But more work is needed to protect patients with disabilities in the allocation of scarce medical resources.Read “When It Comes to Rationing, Disability Rights Law Prohibits More than Prejudice”
SPECIAL EVENTS
Re-opening the Nation, a Series of Hastings Conversations
Read “Re-opening the Nation, a Series of Hastings Conversations”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Tribute to Robert M. Veatch: Human Rights and Other Commitments
Robert M. Veatch, a bioethics pioneer and the first research associate at The Hastings Center, died on November 9. An overarching theme was his commitment to human rights.Read “Tribute to Robert M. Veatch: Human Rights and Other Commitments”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Vaccine Mandates for Kids: It’s Not Whether, But When
States and school boards around the country are engaged in a debate about whether to require middle and high school students to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19. The debate is not so much about whether to mandate. It's when to do so.Read “Vaccine Mandates for Kids: It’s Not Whether, But When”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Vaccine Hesitancy Is No Excuse for Systemic Racism
Fewer vaccines are going to Black people. While it’s easy to fall back on vaccine hesitancy as an excuse, systemic racism is to blame.Hastings Center News
New Guidance Released for Covid-19 Vaccine Allocation
The Hastings Center released new guidance for local public health authorities and health care systems to help ensure equitable and effective prioritization of Covid-19 vaccine access, based on risk factors, in the months ahead.Read “New Guidance Released for Covid-19 Vaccine Allocation”
Hastings Center News
Physicians Honored for Outstanding Care of Patients Near the End of Life
Read “Physicians Honored for Outstanding Care of Patients Near the End of Life”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Report from China: Ethical Questions on the Response to the Coronavirus
Hastings Center fellows in China discuss ethical questions about the response to the spreading coronavirus.Read “Report from China: Ethical Questions on the Response to the Coronavirus”
COVID-19
We Must Test, and Do It Differently, to Re-open the Nation
Read “We Must Test, and Do It Differently, to Re-open the Nation”
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Ethics and Research in Resource-Poor Countries
Selected resources from The Hastings Center. Bioethics Briefings: Research in Resource-Poor Countries As health problems and disease threats cross borders on a global scale, wealthy countries are increasingly funding and...Bioethics Forum Essay
Where is Clinical Ethics in the Revised Hospital Accreditation Standards?
The Joint Commission, which accredits our nation's hospitals, eliminated the sole element of performance that governed clinical ethics services. This decision impedes equity and undercuts progress toward fostering ethical practice in health care.Read “Where is Clinical Ethics in the Revised Hospital Accreditation Standards?”
Hastings Center News
Hastings Center Welcomes 2024 Fellows
The Hastings Center is pleased to announce the election of the 2024 fellows. Hastings Center fellows are a group of about 300 individuals of outstanding accomplishment whose work has informed...Page
Bioethics for Aging Societies
For decades, bioethics scholarship, empirical research, and recommendations concerning older adults has focused on decisions and care in patients nearing the end of life. Until recently, bioethics work on aging...CALLAHAN LECTURE
Advancing Social Justice, Health Equity, and Community
The Covid-19 pandemic has made longstanding, seemingly intractable inequities painfully visible. In addition to widespread suffering, African Americans and Latinx communities are dying at three times the rate of White...Read “Advancing Social Justice, Health Equity, and Community”
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Schedule
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2021 Center Highlights
In 2021, as the country scrambled to decide how to allocate the Covid-19 vaccine, Hastings Center research scholar Nancy Berlinger led a national team to produce detailed guidance on vaccine...SPECIAL EVENT SERIES
Health Equity, Racism, and This Moment in Time
Thursday, August 13, 2020, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM A Hastings Conversations event with: Richard Besser, President, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Herminia Palacio, President, The Guttmacher Institute Mildred Z....Bioethics Forum Essay
Motivated Ignorance: A Challenge for Science Communication and Democracy
Many people are deeply interested in the political process and awash in relevant information., but nevertheless often grossly misinformed, holding confident but unfounded opinions at odds with widely accessible evidence The recent riot at Capitol Hill is just one illustration–albeit a horrifying one–of such misinformation and its potential consequences. The anti-vaccine movement is another example.Read “Motivated Ignorance: A Challenge for Science Communication and Democracy”
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New Guidance for Middle-Tier Covid-19 Vaccine Allocation Focuses on Equity and Effectiveness in Reaching High-Risk Populations
PRESS RELEASE Contact: Susan Gilbert For Immediate Release 1-845-424-4040, ext. 244 communications@thehastingscenter.org New Guidance for Middle-Tier Covid-19 Vaccine Allocation Focuses on Equity and Effectiveness in Reaching High-Risk Populations Ethical Considerations...Bioethics Forum Essay
Improving Linguistic Justice and Accessibility in Bioethics Work
Bioethicists should practice linguistic justice, making our work accessible to people by using relatable language. It's key to improving health justice.Read “Improving Linguistic Justice and Accessibility in Bioethics Work”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Ethical Medicine Means Getting Political
Dilemmas that clinicians face in the coronavirus pandemic–who gets the ventilator, the 80-year-old grandmother or the 20-year-old student?–are the bread and butter of mainstream bioethics. In medical school, my classmates and I memorized the four principles (beneficence, nonmaleficence, justice, and autonomy), which we were told would help us make hard clinical decisions in ethically ambiguous terrain. But Covid-19 shows that medical ethics means much more than what generally falls under bioethics. Medical ethics is deeply political, and to act ethically in medicine means engaging the larger context in which it operates.Page
Hastings Center Names Vardit Ravitsky New President
March 29, 2023 — The Hastings Center Board of Trustees announced that Vardit Ravitsky, PhD, a leading bioethicist whose career has focused on the ethical, legal, and social implications of...Bioethics Forum Essay
Ashamed to Be Vaccinated? The Ethics of Health Care Employees Forgoing Unfair Priority
Suppose you are young, healthy, employed in a health care system and that your line of work does not require leaving the low-risk comfort of your home. Now suppose that your employer offers you a vaccine. You know there are others in your community who are at greater risk of contracting and dying from Covid-19 than you. Should you accept the dose?Read “Ashamed to Be Vaccinated? The Ethics of Health Care Employees Forgoing Unfair Priority”
From Bioethics Briefings
Public Health Ethics and Law
Framing the Issue The role of public health is to assure the conditions needed to promote and protect people’s health. These conditions include various economic, social, and environmental factors...Bioethics Forum Essay
Another Pragmatic Public Health Decision
There has been much criticism of the decision by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to let Covid-infected people who are feeling better to stop quarantining after five days and simply wear a mask. But this sort of pragmatic decision has a long history in public health.Bioethics Forum Essay
Bioethics and Black Lives: A Call for Bioethics to Speak Against Racial Injustice
George Floyd could not breathe while his neck was trapped under the knee of a police officer for nearly nine minutes. Yet despite the impressive scholarship of bioethics on ventilation and other technologies that prolong human breathing capabilities, it is largely silent on the suffocating effects of racism. Bioethics must speak out against racial injustice.Read “Bioethics and Black Lives: A Call for Bioethics to Speak Against Racial Injustice”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Ethics and Evidence in the Search for a Vaccine and Treatments for Covid-19
In the rush to find a Covid-19 vaccine and one or more drugs to treat the deadly disease, concerns are being raised that ethical standards for conducting human clinical trials and the evidentiary standards for determining whether interventions are safe and effective, might be loosened.Read “Ethics and Evidence in the Search for a Vaccine and Treatments for Covid-19”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Contemporary Circus Draws on Ethics to Support Diversity
Even though the circus exists in the same world as theater and movies, it has been largely exempt from public criticism, apart from accusations of animal cruelty. But under the broad rubric of “contemporary circus,” this familiar entertainment genre is distancing itself from its past and creating a new and vibrant art form. And underlying this transformation is an ethical commitment to social justice, inclusion, and equity.Read “Contemporary Circus Draws on Ethics to Support Diversity”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Exhortations to Trust Biomedical Experts: What’s Missing?
Disagreements among biomedical experts regarding whether the scientific evidence supports delaying the second shot of Covid-19 vaccines or pausing the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines because of very rare side effects bring to the fore missing aspects in exhortations to trust biomedical experts.Read “Exhortations to Trust Biomedical Experts: What’s Missing?”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Masks Are Not Created Equal
Finally, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is working on developing standards for masks to see which ones actually block viruses. In the meantime, though, we should all be acting on what we do know about the effectiveness of various masks against Covid.NEWS
Center Names Vardit Ravitsky New President
The Hastings Center Board of Trustees today announced that Vardit Ravitsky, PhD, a leading bioethicist whose career has focused on the ethical, legal, and social implications of emerging technologies, will...Bioethics Forum Essay
Show Me Your Passport: Ethical Concerns About Covid-19 Antibody Testing as Key to Reopening Public Life
Around the world, governments are looking for safe ways to lift unprecedented restrictions on public activities to curb the spread of Covid-19. So-called immunity passports could be key to the effort to selectively ease restrictions for people presumed to be immune to the virus. But there are scientific and ethical questions to be worked out before they can be deployed. .Hastings Center News
Hastings Center Cofounder Willard Gaylin (1925-2022)
Willard Gaylin, an acclaimed psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and a pioneering scholar in bioethics who co-founded The Hastings Center, died on December 30. He was 97.Page
Re-Opening the Nation: What Values Should Guide Us?
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Ethics and Neonatal Care
Selected resources from The Hastings Center. Bioethics Briefings: Neonatal Care Advances in the care of critically ill newborns over the last 40 years have resulted in the ability to save...Bioethics Forum Essay
Responding to Ebola: Health Care Professionals’ Obligations to Provide Care
As health care institutions in the United States prepare for Ebola patients, many have adopted the policy that those providing hands-on care should come from a pool of volunteers. Given...Read “Responding to Ebola: Health Care Professionals’ Obligations to Provide Care”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Measles, Vaccination, and the Tragedy of the Commons
After having been virtually eliminated in the United States in the year 2000, measles have made a comeback, with nearly 150 cases in 17 states and nearly 30 confirmed cases of the...Bioethics Forum Essay
Vaccine Exemptions and the Church-State Problem
The current measles outbreak has brought public attention to the ease with which vaccine exemptions are available. As the media continually inform us, 48 states allow for religious exemptions, while...Bioethics Forum Essay
Responding to Ebola: Misplaced Police Powers
A number of states have recently adopted mandatory quarantine measures, including New York and New Jersey, for any individual entering the United States who had direct contact with someone infected with Ebola. This...Bioethics Forum Essay
Responding to Ebola: Questions about Resuscitation
While details of the deaths of patients in Dallas and Madrid from Ebola are not public, their passing prompts questions about resuscitation in individuals infected with the virus. To date,...Bioethics Forum Essay
Responding to Ebola: Retrofitting Governance Systems
In a recent New York Times op-ed, David Brooks observes that governance, in the form of multilateral organizing, is missing from the response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Unfortunately, global...Bioethics Forum Essay
Responding to Ebola: Fostering Transparency and Inclusivity
Media reports indicate that seven individuals have received ZMapp to date, two of whom have died. The first recipients were two American health care workers from Liberia who were treated...Read “Responding to Ebola: Fostering Transparency and Inclusivity”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Romanian Orphans: A Reconsideration of the Ethics of the Bucharest Early Intervention Project
Recently I had a Susan Reverby moment. Reverby is the Wellesley historian best known for unearthing the revelations of the Guatemalan syphilis and gonorrhea studies conducted by the United States Public Health...Read “Romanian Orphans: A Reconsideration of the Ethics of the Bucharest Early Intervention Project”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Responding to Ebola: The Question of Quarantine
Dr. Craig Spencer, the first person in New York confirmed to have Ebola, is a clearly dedicated and selfless physician who worked for Doctors Without Borders in West Africa helping...Bioethics Forum Essay
New York’s Measles Outbreak: Take Off Your Shoes and Roll Up Your Sleeve
Today’s New York Times reported a rare outbreak of measles in New York City. Because the disease was mostly eradicated by 2000, most clinicians were baffled by the high fevers, rash, and respiratory...Read “New York’s Measles Outbreak: Take Off Your Shoes and Roll Up Your Sleeve”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Lessons from Ebola: Presidential Bioethics Commission Releases Recommendations on Preparedness for Public Health Emergencies
This week the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues released a brief, Ethics and Ebola: Public Health Planning and Response,to the administration and the public on ethical preparedness for...