- Bioethics Forum Essay
Surprising Surge of Egg Freezing During the Pandemic Raises Ethical Questions
Read the Post Covid-19 Ethical Framework and Supplements
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New Guidance Released for Covid-19 Vaccine Allocation
Read the Post Ethical Challenges in the Middle Tier of Covid-19 Vaccine Allocation: Guidance for Organizational Decision-Making
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The Bioethics of Built Health Care Spaces
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Masks Are Not Created Equal
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayFinally, 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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Ashamed to Be Vaccinated? The Ethics of Health Care Employees Forgoing Unfair Priority
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssaySuppose 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Coronavirus Mutation Panic
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe headlines are terrifying: A highly contagious new variant of the coronavirus is circulating in England. As the story spread, politicians and media outlets reported a devastating statistic: the new strain is 70% more transmissible than other strains of the virus. This has led to new lockdowns; many border closures; flight cancellations; and people fleeing the U.K. by train, boat, and plane. But is any of this necessary? Is the world suffering from mutation panic?Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Prioritizing the “1a”: Ethically Allocating Scarce Covid Vaccines to Health Care Workers
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayBeginning 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Global Allocation of Coronavirus Vaccines
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayA 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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Bioethics, Nazi Analogies, and the Coronavirus Pandemic
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Resisting Public Health Measures, Then and Now
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayOne 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?Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Protecting Communities from COVID-19
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Human Plasma and Bioethics Nationalism
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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.Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Dr. Fauci on Public Trust in Science
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Ethics of Emergency Use Authorization During the Pandemic
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Ethics of Placebo Controls in Coronavirus Vaccine Trials
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayMultiple 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 the Post - Hastings Center News
Hastings Center President Speaks on Systemic Racism, Health Inequities, and Covid-19
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Amid the Pandemic and Racial Injustice, Greater Empathy in Medical School
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Could the Common Cold Help Stop Covid-19? We Need to Know–Now.
Read the PostCOVID-19In 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Volunteering for a Covid Vaccine Trial: Fulfilling Hindu Obligations or Fostering Pharmaceutical Company Profits?
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Living through the Pandemic in New Zealand
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn 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.”Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Fair Compensation for Rare Vaccine Harms
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We Can’t Forget the Nation’s Other Epidemic
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Are Physicians Hypocrites for Supporting Black Lives Matter Protests and Opposing Anti-Lockdown Protests? An Ethical Analysis
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayPhysicians 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?Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Covid-19 and Deafness: Why the Protocols Fall Short
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Did Russia’s Most Influential Bioethicist Get a Coronavirus Vaccine?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAlong 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Hacking Ventilators in a Pandemic
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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?Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Is the Coronavirus Pandemic Accelerating Bioethics Nationalism?
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Against Personal Ventilator Reallocation
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Lawsuits of Last Resort: Employees Fight for Safe Workplaces during Covid-19
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The Americans with Disabilities Act at 30: A Cause for Celebration During Covid-19?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayA 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 Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
On Being a Foster Parent During Covid
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Pandemic Language
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayLanguage used to describe the response to the pandemic can illuminate, and it can distort. Here I focus on language that obfuscates thinking about the pandemic. As the death toll mounted in New York City in April, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was reported to have declared, “Ventilators are to th...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Before We Turn to Digital Contact Tracing for Covid, Remember Surveillance in the Sixties
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIs 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Covid-19 Makes Clear that Bioethics Must Confront Health Disparities
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayWith 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Using the Pandemic as an Excuse to Limit Abortion
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssaySeveral 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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Social-Change Games Can Help Us Understand the Public Health Choices We Face
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayBefore 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Accepting the Challenge: Covid Vaccine Challenge Trials Can Be Ethically Justified
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Cracks in the System: Lessons Learned from the Covid-19 Pandemic
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
“If the virus doesn’t kill us, the stress and anxiety will.” Immigrants during Covid
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayGrowing 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Bringing Ethics into the Global Coronavirus Response
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayCovid-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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
After the Surge: Prioritizing the Backlog of Delayed Hospital Procedures
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
“You Can See Your Loved One Now.” Can Visitor Restrictions During Covid Unduly Influence End-of-Life Decisions?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayOne 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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Human Challenge Studies for Covid-19 Vaccine: Questions about Benefits and Risks
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayExperts 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Committing to Fight Racism
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayWe 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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Measure Twice and Cut Once: The Value of Health Care Ethicists in the Pandemic
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Individual Freedom or Public Health? A False Choice in the Covid Era
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayWhen 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Prioritize Health Care Workers for Ventilators? Not So Fast
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Warp Speed Bioethics
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Clinicians Have a Moral Duty to Care for All Patients–Including Lockdown Protesters
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayProtesters 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Lessons from Covid-19: Why Treating Sick Patients is Bad Business for Hospitals
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Covid-19 Underscores Racial Disparity in Advance Directives
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Report from Sub-Saharan Africa: “When the Health Fundamentals Are Weak, Covid Will Expose You.”
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Post-Covid Bioethics
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayCovid-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?Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Covid-19 Crisis Triage—Optimizing Health Outcomes and Disability Rights
Read the PostHastings Center NewsWriting in the New England Journal of Medicine, Hastings Center president Mildred Solomon and two Hastings Center fellows address concerns that crisis triage protocols aimed at allocating scarce health care resources to save the most lives could be biased against people with disabilities. Their arti...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Beyond the Covid Crisis—A New Social Contract with Public Health
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Why I Don’t Support Age-Related Rationing During the Covid Pandemic
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#WeAreEssential: Why Disabled People Should Be Appointed to Hospital Triage Committees
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThere's a long history of conflict between the institution of medicine, bioethics, and the disability community. With Covid-19 disproportionately affecting people with disabilities, we must do everything we can to avoid a triage decision-making process that pushes disabled people to the side. One important action is to appoint people with disabilities, and especially those of color, to hospital triage committees. To our knowledge, no hospital or state crisis standards of care protocol mandates this kind of representation.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
A Covid-19 Side Effect: Virulent Resurgence of Ageism
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Diversity and Solidarity in Response to Covid-19
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayCovid-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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Should New Mothers With Covid-19 Be Separated From Their Newborns?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe Covid-19 pandemic has been characterized by many unknowns, chief among them in the world of pediatric ethics is the question of separating mothers who are infected or suspected of being infected from their newborns after delivery to reduce the risk of mother-to-child transmission. Guidance on this issue is conflicting.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Why Health Care Workers Should Receive Priority Care for Covid-19
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Sustaining Clinical Empathy During the Pandemic
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Teaching Medical Ethics During the Pandemic
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayDespite 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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Show Me Your Passport: Ethical Concerns About Covid-19 Antibody Testing as Key to Reopening Public Life
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAround 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. .Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Ethical Medicine Means Getting Political
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayDilemmas 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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Ethical Responsibility in Publishing Research Results on Covid-19 Treatments
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThere 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Clinical Trials vs. Right to Try: Ethical Use of Chloroquine for Covid-19
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayDouble-blind randomized clinical trials are the gold standard for answering the scientific question of whether a drug produces any effect, positive or negative, in Covid-19 patients. But is rational for a patient to choose to try a drug such as chloroquine for Covid-19 outside of a trial? Some patients may correctly hold that they have little to lose.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
When to Reopen the Nation is an Ethics Question—Not Only a Scientific One
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAs 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Religion During the Coronavirus Pandemic: Islamic Bioethical Perspectives
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayCongregational 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Immigrants, Health Inequities, and Social Citizenship in Covid-19 Response and Recovery
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe novel coronavirus pandemic has starkly revealed the vulnerabilities of low-wage immigrants, immigrant-led households, and immigrant communities to coronavirus infection, severe Covid-19 illness, and economic fallout from pandemic. This public health emergency compounds pre-existing social inequa...Read the Post - COVID-19
We Must Test, and Do It Differently, to Re-open the Nation
Read the PostCOVID-19This week at “Re-Opening the Nation: What Values Should Guide Us?” — an online Hastings Conversation, experts said the Covid-19 pandemic posed two interconnected existential threats: to our health and to our economy, both of which require that we dramatically gear up in a war-like footin...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
The Covid Threat No One Is Talking About: Wearing Scrubs in Public
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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 Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Denying Ventilators to Covid-19 Patients with Prior DNR Orders is Unethical
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayPreviously-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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Structural Racism, White Fragility, and Ventilator Rationing Policies
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIt’s been painful to watch health leaders twist themselves into moral knots denying that recently created ventilator rationing guidance will differentially affect Blacks, Latinx, and other people of color. On television, in newspapers, and on listservs, when the predicted disproportionate impacts of these policies are raised, some bioethicists-often white, stonewall. Or repeat a policy’s assertions that race, ethnicity, disability, etc. are irrelevant to care decisions. Or default to the intent of the policymakers.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Please Don’t (Need to) Use My Work
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayI 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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Ethics and Evidence in the Search for a Vaccine and Treatments for Covid-19
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
U.S. and Canada: Being Good Neighbors in the Pandemic
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On Being an Elder in a Pandemic
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayDo 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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
When It Comes to Rationing, Disability Rights Law Prohibits More than Prejudice
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThis 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Why I Support Age-Related Rationing of Ventilators for Covid-19 Patients
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The Price of Going Back to Work Too Soon
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayPresident Donald Trump had, until very recently, spent as much time in his public appearances proclaiming victory over the Covid-19 pandemic rippling across the nation as he had offering directives that would diminish it. Again and again, he promised that it would soon be over, especially as the wea...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Confronting Disability Discrimination During the Pandemic
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAs 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Crowdfunding for Covid-Related Needs: Unfair and Inadequate
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We Need International Medical Graduates to Help Fight Covid-19. Immigration Policies Keep Them Away
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAs the U.S. health care system faces the strain of responding to the coronavirus pandemic, critical services are being provided by international medical graduates, who, in the years and months leading up to this crisis, have found their capacity to contribute limited by increasingly restrictive immi...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
In the Media: The Hastings Center Responds to Covid-19
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America’s Bioethicists and Health Care Leaders: Government Must Use Federal Powers To Fight COVID-19
Read the PostHastings Center NewsNearly 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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Flattening the Curve, Then What?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe metaphor “flattening the curve” has succinctly captured the challenge of responding to the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. With no vaccine or effective treatment, the use of social distancing measures attempts to delay the spread of infection and keep the need for intensive, hospi...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
False Hope About Coronavirus Treatments
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COVID-19 and the Global Ethics Freefall
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The Hastings Center Produces Guidance for Ethical Practice in Responding to COVID-19
Read the PostHastings Center NewsThe 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 Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
COVID: Collective of Voices in Distress
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayI get off the phone with a dear friend and colleague in Italy, and the news is devastating. Health care workers dying, impossible choices of triaging limited resources, the real human toll is palpable in her voice. She says, this is not political, this is a public health “nightmare.” I then get ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Coronavirus and the Crisis of Trust
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