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Ethics

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?
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
Bioethics Forum Essay

Individuals Declared Brain-Dead Remain Biologically Alive

A remarkable experiment raises anew questions about whether brain-death is really death.
Read Individuals Declared Brain-Dead Remain Biologically Alive
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
Bioethics Forum Essay
Young patient in a medical face mask getting an antiviral vaccine at the hospital

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
Bioethics Forum Essay
black and white image of the white house, a rounded pillared building behind collections of trees

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.
Read The Ethics of Treating the President
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.”
Read Living through the Pandemic in New Zealand
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

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
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

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.
Read Please Don’t (Need to) Use My Work
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.
Read On Being an Elder in a Pandemic
Bioethics Forum Essay

The Price of Going Back to Work Too Soon

Read The Price of Going Back to Work Too Soon
Bioethics Forum Essay
quarantine sign

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.
Read COVID-19 and the Global Ethics Freefall
Bioethics Forum Essay

Why Health Care Organizations Need Technology Ethics Committees

There is big money in using technology to find information in patient and medical staff data. Companies are rushing to cash in. The Food and Drug Administration has approved more than 40 artificial intelligence-based products for use in medicine. Tens of thousands of medical phone apps are tracking patients and gathering detailed medical information about them. These new technologies bring new ethical questions that health care organizations are poorly equipped to answer.
Read Why Health Care Organizations Need Technology Ethics Committees
Bioethics Forum Essay

What’s Wrong with Virginity Testing?

When the rapper T. I. disclosed on a podcast that he takes his 18-year-old daughter to a yearly gynecological examination to ensure that her hymen is still intact, the reaction of most people was condemnation. His obsession with her virginity is creepy, his subjecting her to an invasive procedure that has no medical value is controlling, and his willingness to talk about it publicly displays contempt for her rights to privacy and dignity. Some think that the law should prohibit physicians from performing or supervising virginity examinations. But the law is not the best means for dealing with the problem, and the problem is not simply virginity testing.
Read What’s Wrong with Virginity Testing?
Bioethics Forum Essay

Citizen Science: Potential Benefits and Ethical Challenges

Read Citizen Science: Potential Benefits and Ethical Challenges
Bioethics Forum Essay

Hannah Arendt in St. Peter’s Square

Neither one of us expected to be talking about Hannah Arendt at the Vatican. We had been invited to give talks at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on the scientific and ethical challenges posed by personalized medicine. Walking across the cobblestones of St. Peter’s Square we began to discuss how society regulates biomedical research. Are institutional review boards capable of dealing with innovations like personalized medicine? Are they too bound by regulations? Can they ask larger questions of meaning when simply following the rules won't suffice? And most worrisome, has their bureaucratic function caused them to mistake regulatory compliance for ethical reflection?
Read Hannah Arendt in St. Peter’s Square
Bioethics Forum Essay
#migrantchildrendental

It’s Unethical to Use Dental X-Rays to Send Migrant Children to Adult Detention Facilities

The U.S. government is using dental scans to determine if migrant youths are over age 18. The scans are inaccurate for this purpose, and yet they determine if children are sent to adult detention centers.
Read It’s Unethical to Use Dental X-Rays to Send Migrant Children to Adult Detention Facilities
Bioethics Forum Essay
small boy wrapped around a woman's chest and shoulders

From Outcry to Solidarity with Migrants: What Is the Good We Can Do?

Another June. Another public outcry about cruelty as policy harming migrants in United States custody. This summer, the photo of a drowned family, Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter, Valeria, of El Salvador, shocks the conscience. Reporters are documenting the inhumane conditions in a Border Patrol facility where hundreds of children have been held. How should our field respond?
Read From Outcry to Solidarity with Migrants: What Is the Good We Can Do?
Bioethics Forum Essay

What’s Wrong with a Fertility Doctor Using His Own Sperm?

It was unethical for a fertility doctor to use his own sperm to inseminate patients without their consent. But what are the legal harms to the women? To their children?
Read What’s Wrong with a Fertility Doctor Using His Own Sperm?
Bioethics Forum Essay

Ethical Perspectives on Advance Directives for Dementia

Four articles in the Hastings Center Report make an array of claims about  whether advance directives should or should not be used to instruct caregivers to withhold oral feeding of...
Read Ethical Perspectives on Advance Directives for Dementia
Bioethics Forum Essay

Gun Violence, Shame, and Social Change

The language of shame has been prominent in the aftermath of the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida. In a March 23 essay in The New Yorker,...
Read Gun Violence, Shame, and Social Change
Bioethics Forum Essay

Businesses, Guns, and Human Rights

The mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., resulted in the deaths of 17 people. Tragically, from January 1 to March 21, 2018, there were 3,088...
Read Businesses, Guns, and Human Rights
Bioethics Forum Essay

Ethical Supervision?

As I read a recently published report of an interesting and important placebo-controlled trial of arthroscopic shoulder surgery, one sentence in particular caught my eye: “The study was designed under...
Read Ethical Supervision?
Bioethics Forum Essay

Fake News: A Role for Neuroethics?

Fake news proliferates on the internet, and it sometimes has consequential effects. It may have played a role in the recent election of Donald Trump to the White House, and...
Read Fake News: A Role for Neuroethics?
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