Faster access and fairer benefits for all. It sounds simple. But is it?

This year will be the most important moment for global health since WHO’s founding in 1948, but only if states give major reforms their full political and financial backing.

As I sit here in my office at the Slovak Medical University in Bratislava, my colleagues are experiencing great moral anguish because of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine. Simultaneously, we are also confronting the Omicron wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. The war complicates and burdens health care here and in other border nations exponentially, and especially so in combination with the pandemic.

The recognition of the social injustices surrounding the pandemic is an important opportunity to understand the longstanding links between health and social and global justice.

The commitments made by the wealthiest countries to share Covid vaccines and funding for international cooperation mechanisms are crucial, but insufficient. They reflect the “securitization of health,” a 21st century phenomenon whereby states turn health issues into national security issues.

The United States, Russia, and China support temporary patent waivers for Covid vaccines. The waivers, which need support from other countries, would likely save lives in low- and middle-income countries.

In Costa Rica, where I live, only 24% of the population has received at least one vaccine dose because we have received very small amounts of vaccines. The Costa Rican president suggested that every person who can travel to the U.S. to get the jab, should do it. Vaccine tourism, then, seems to be another promising business opportunity for the powerful countries that have accumulated vaccines instead of redistributing them soon and fairly.

Citing the Yellow Card as precedent for Covid-19 travel passes that exempt those with proof of vaccination from testing and quarantine mandates when crossing certain borders is an erroneous policy assumption that could prolong the pandemic and imperil global health.

The World Health Organization recently released a long-anticipated report on SARS-CoV-2 origins, based on 28 days of field research and site visits in China conducted jointly by 17 international and...

A third Covid vaccine candidate moving closer to potential FDA authorization is less effective than the two Covid vaccines already authorized in the United States. Is it ethical to offer a vaccine with lower efficacy? Is it ethical not to offer it in a public health emergency?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Since the initial outbreak in Wuhan last December, the national and global responses to COVID-19 have been in ethics freefall.

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.

The death of Dr Li Wenliang from COVID-19 is heartbreaking for our country and people. Dr. Li was reprimanded for messages he posted in a chat group warning fellow doctors about a mysterious infection. His death from coronavirus underscored gaps and deficiencies in our country’s health care system and system of governance.

Hastings Center fellows in China discuss ethical questions about the response to the spreading coronavirus.

Are we ethically obliged to eat less meat? Bioethicists consider that question, and their role in addressing it.

What does it mean to live well on a warming planet? And as the climate changes, how might health care, education, and other sectors support, or obstruct, our ability to respond? The answers to these profound, and profoundly bioethical, questions will critically influence human well-being in this century and beyond. A group of scientists, educators, and bioethicists convened at The Hastings Center recently to consider these questions and begin an interdisciplinary conversation on how bioethics might address the challenges posed by climate change.

The Russian poet Anna Akhmatova was a mother separated from her child by a state policy of terror. During the 1930s, she and other mothers would gather outside a Leningrad...

In April, the U.S. Justice Department announced that it would criminally prosecute migrants who had been apprehended after crossing the U.S.-Mexico. border. An immediate consequence of this announcement, explained in...

Human infection challenge studies, which deliberately expose healthy volunteers to disease-causing infectious agents under carefully controlled conditions, offer a valuable method of biomedical research aimed at efficient initial efficacy testing...