Skip to content
  • Connect:
  • The Hastings Center on Facebook
  • The Hastings Center on Linkedin
  • The Hastings Center on Twitter
  • The Hastings Center on YouTube
  • The Hastings Center on Instagram
  • Send The Hastings Center an Email
Primary Navigation

The Hastings Center

  • Who We Are
  • Our Focus Areas
  • Publications & Resources
  • Support Us
Donate Now Subscribe
Search The Hastings Center
  • Our Mission
  • Our Approach
  • Our Research
  • Our Team
  • Our Public Engagement
  • Our Financials
  • Service to Bioethics
  • Campus
  • For The Media
Events
List of all our Events here
Receive Our Newsletter

  • The Human Life Span
  • Health & Health Care
  • Science & Technology
  • Environment
Events
List of all our Events here
Receive Our Newsletter

  • Hastings Center Report
  • Special Reports
  • Ethics & Human Research
  • Bioethics Briefings
  • Hastings Bioethics Forum
  • Books by Hastings Scholars
  • Bioethics Careers & Education
Events
List of all our Events here
Receive Our Newsletter

  • What is the Challenge?
  • Online Giving
Events
List of all our Events here
Receive Our Newsletter

Covid-19 Ethics Resource Center

  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Surprising Surge of Egg Freezing During the Pandemic Raises Ethical Questions

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Covid-19 Ethical Framework and Supplements

    Read the Post
    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, 2020, https://www.thehastingscenter.org/ethicalframeworkcovid19/.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Hastings Center News

    New Guidance Released for Covid-19 Vaccine Allocation

    Read the Post
    Hastings Center News
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Ethical Challenges in the Middle Tier of Covid-19 Vaccine Allocation: Guidance for Organizational Decision-Making

    Read the Post
    Download PDF
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    The Bioethics of Built Health Care Spaces

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Masks Are Not Created Equal

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Ashamed to Be Vaccinated? The Ethics of Health Care Employees Forgoing Unfair Priority

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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?
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Coronavirus Mutation Panic

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    The 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?
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Prioritizing the “1a”: Ethically Allocating Scarce Covid Vaccines to Health Care Workers

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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?
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Global Allocation of Coronavirus Vaccines

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Bioethics, Nazi Analogies, and the Coronavirus Pandemic

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.”
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Resisting Public Health Measures, Then and Now

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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?
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Hastings Center News

    Protecting Communities from COVID-19

    Read the Post
    Hastings Center News
    FOUR STEPS TO PROTECT COMMUNITIES FROM COVID-19 AND RESTORE THE ECONOMY
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Human Plasma and Bioethics Nationalism

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Hastings Center News

    Dr. Fauci on Public Trust in Science

    Read the Post
    Hastings Center News
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Ethics of Emergency Use Authorization During the Pandemic

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Ethics of Placebo Controls in Coronavirus Vaccine Trials

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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?
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Hastings Center News

    Hastings Center President Speaks on Systemic Racism, Health Inequities, and Covid-19

    Read the Post
    Hastings Center News
    In two recent talks, one at the National Institutes of Health and the other at the Washington-based Cosmos Club, Hastings Center president Mildred Solomon discussed the connection between systemic racism, other social determinants of health, and health inequities.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Amid the Pandemic and Racial Injustice, Greater Empathy in Medical School

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • COVID-19

    Could the Common Cold Help Stop Covid-19? We Need to Know–Now.

    Read the Post
    COVID-19
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Volunteering for a Covid Vaccine Trial: Fulfilling Hindu Obligations or Fostering Pharmaceutical Company Profits?

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    Volunteering for a Covid-19 vaccine trial satisfied my altruistic goals and harmonizes with my Hindu beliefs. But I am troubled that a drug company is going to profit from my altruism and my religious obligations.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Living through the Pandemic in New Zealand

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.”
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Fair Compensation for Rare Vaccine Harms

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    As multiple Covid vaccine candidates enter clinical trials and hopefully move closer to approval, one important unanswered question is how to compensate the rare cases of serious vaccine harm.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    We Can’t Forget the Nation’s Other Epidemic

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    Covid isn’t merely overshadowing the drug overdose crisis—it’s directly worsening it.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Are Physicians Hypocrites for Supporting Black Lives Matter Protests and Opposing Anti-Lockdown Protests? An Ethical Analysis

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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?
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Covid-19 and Deafness: Why the Protocols Fall Short

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    I am hard-of-hearing; I wear two hearing aids, and Covid-19 has made all forms of human interaction extraordinarily difficult.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Did Russia’s Most Influential Bioethicist Get a Coronavirus Vaccine?

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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?
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Hacking Ventilators in a Pandemic

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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?
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Is the Coronavirus Pandemic Accelerating Bioethics Nationalism?

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Against Personal Ventilator Reallocation

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Lawsuits of Last Resort: Employees Fight for Safe Workplaces during Covid-19

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    The Americans with Disabilities Act at 30: A Cause for Celebration During Covid-19?

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    On Being a Foster Parent During Covid

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Pandemic Language

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    Language 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...
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Before We Turn to Digital Contact Tracing for Covid, Remember Surveillance in the Sixties

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Covid-19 Makes Clear that Bioethics Must Confront Health Disparities

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Using the Pandemic as an Excuse to Limit Abortion

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Social-Change Games Can Help Us Understand the Public Health Choices We Face

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Accepting the Challenge: Covid Vaccine Challenge Trials Can Be Ethically Justified

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Cracks in the System: Lessons Learned from the Covid-19 Pandemic

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    “If the virus doesn’t kill us, the stress and anxiety will.” Immigrants during Covid

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Bringing Ethics into the Global Coronavirus Response

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    After the Surge: Prioritizing the Backlog of Delayed Hospital Procedures

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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?
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    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 Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Human Challenge Studies for Covid-19 Vaccine: Questions about Benefits and Risks

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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?
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Committing to Fight Racism

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Measure Twice and Cut Once: The Value of Health Care Ethicists in the Pandemic

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Individual Freedom or Public Health? A False Choice in the Covid Era

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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?
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Prioritize Health Care Workers for Ventilators? Not So Fast

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Warp Speed Bioethics

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    It takes less time than ever to publish papers. But is quality sacrificed by doing bioethics at warp speed, especially during the Covid pandemic?
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Clinicians Have a Moral Duty to Care for All Patients–Including Lockdown Protesters

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Lessons from Covid-19: Why Treating Sick Patients is Bad Business for Hospitals

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Covid-19 Underscores Racial Disparity in Advance Directives

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Report from Sub-Saharan Africa: “When the Health Fundamentals Are Weak, Covid Will Expose You.”

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Post-Covid Bioethics

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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?
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Hastings Center News

    Covid-19 Crisis Triage—Optimizing Health Outcomes and Disability Rights

    Read the Post
    Hastings Center News
    Writing 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...
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Beyond the Covid Crisis—A New Social Contract with Public Health

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Why I Don’t Support Age-Related Rationing During the Covid Pandemic

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    #WeAreEssential: Why Disabled People Should Be Appointed to Hospital Triage Committees

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    There'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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    A Covid-19 Side Effect: Virulent Resurgence of Ageism

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Diversity and Solidarity in Response to Covid-19

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Should New Mothers With Covid-19 Be Separated From Their Newborns?

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    The 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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Why Health Care Workers Should Receive Priority Care for Covid-19

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Sustaining Clinical Empathy During the Pandemic

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Teaching Medical Ethics During the Pandemic

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    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 Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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. .
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Ethical Medicine Means Getting Political

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Ethical Responsibility in Publishing Research Results on Covid-19 Treatments

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Clinical Trials vs. Right to Try: Ethical Use of Chloroquine for Covid-19

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    Double-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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    When to Reopen the Nation is an Ethics Question—Not Only a Scientific One

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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?
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Religion During the Coronavirus Pandemic: Islamic Bioethical Perspectives

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Immigrants, Health Inequities, and Social Citizenship in Covid-19 Response and Recovery

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    The 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...
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • COVID-19

    We Must Test, and Do It Differently, to Re-open the Nation

    Read the Post
    COVID-19
    This 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...
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    The Covid Threat No One Is Talking About: Wearing Scrubs in Public

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Denying Ventilators to Covid-19 Patients with Prior DNR Orders is Unethical

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Structural Racism, White Fragility, and Ventilator Rationing Policies

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    It’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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Please Don’t (Need to) Use My Work

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Ethics and Evidence in the Search for a Vaccine and Treatments for Covid-19

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    U.S. and Canada: Being Good Neighbors in the Pandemic

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    On Being an Elder in a Pandemic

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    When It Comes to Rationing, Disability Rights Law Prohibits More than Prejudice

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Why I Support Age-Related Rationing of Ventilators for Covid-19 Patients

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    The Price of Going Back to Work Too Soon

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    President 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...
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Confronting Disability Discrimination During the Pandemic

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Crowdfunding for Covid-Related Needs: Unfair and Inadequate

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    We Need International Medical Graduates to Help Fight Covid-19. Immigration Policies Keep Them Away

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    As 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...
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Hastings Center News

    In the Media: The Hastings Center Responds to Covid-19

    Read the Post
    Hastings Center News
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Hastings Center News

    America’s Bioethicists and Health Care Leaders: Government Must Use Federal Powers To Fight COVID-19

    Read the Post
    Hastings Center News
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Flattening the Curve, Then What?

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    The 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...
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    False Hope About Coronavirus Treatments

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    While patients can and do recover from coronavirus infections, there are currently no approved treatments that are known to work against COVID-19.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    COVID-19 and the Global Ethics Freefall

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    Since the initial outbreak in Wuhan last December, the national and global responses to COVID-19 have been in ethics freefall.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Hastings Center News

    The Hastings Center Produces Guidance for Ethical Practice in Responding to COVID-19

    Read the Post
    Hastings Center News
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    COVID: Collective of Voices in Distress

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    I 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 ...
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Coronavirus and the Crisis of Trust

    Read the Post
    Bioethics Forum Essay
    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.
    Share: FacebookTwitterEmail
    Read the Post
The Hastings Center
  • Who We Are
    • Our Mission
    • Our Approach
    • Our Research
    • Our Team
    • Our Public Engagement
    • Our Financials
    • Service to Bioethics
    • Campus
    • For The Media
  • Our Focus Areas
    • The Human Life Span
    • Health & Health Care
    • Science & Technology
    • Environment
  • Publications & Resources
    • Hastings Center Report
    • Special Reports
    • Ethics & Human Research
    • Bioethics Briefings
    • Hastings Bioethics Forum
    • Books by Hastings Scholars
    • Bioethics Careers & Education
  • Support Us
    • What is the Challenge?
    • Online Giving
  • Connect:
  • The Hastings Center on Facebook
  • The Hastings Center on Linkedin
  • The Hastings Center on Twitter
  • The Hastings Center on YouTube
  • The Hastings Center on Instagram
  • Send The Hastings Center an Email
  • Who We Are
    • Back
    • Our Mission
    • Our Approach
    • Our Research
    • Our Team
    • Our Public Engagement
    • Our Financials
    • Service to Bioethics
    • Campus
    • For The Media
  • Our Focus Areas
    • Back
    • The Human Life Span
    • Health & Health Care
    • Science & Technology
    • Environment
  • Publications & Resources
    • Back
    • Hastings Center Report
    • Special Reports
    • Ethics & Human Research
    • Bioethics Briefings
    • Hastings Bioethics Forum
    • Books by Hastings Scholars
    • Bioethics Careers & Education
  • Support Us
    • Back
    • What is the Challenge?
    • Online Giving
  •  
  • Facebook
  • Linkedin
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
  • Instagram
  • Email Us
  •  
  • Events
    List of all our Events here
  • Receive Our Newsletter

  •  
  • For the Media
  • Terms of Use
  • Sitemap