Hastings Center News
Cofounder Daniel Callahan Organizes Global Health Meeting
Daniel Callahan, cofounder and president emeritus of The Hastings Center, organized a daylong meeting to explore urgent issues in global health and discuss ways that bioethics can help address them....Read “Cofounder Daniel Callahan Organizes Global Health Meeting”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Navigating Ethics Review of Human Infection Trials With Zika
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...Read “Navigating Ethics Review of Human Infection Trials With Zika”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Shocking the Conscience: Justice Department versus the Health of Immigrant Women and Children
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...Read “Shocking the Conscience: Justice Department versus the Health of Immigrant Women and Children”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Migrants’ Lives, Immigration Policy, and Ethics Work
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...Hastings Center News
New Project: Public Deliberation on Gene Editing in the Wild
With funding from the National Science Foundation, a new Hastings Center project will examine the rationale and challenges of public deliberation on the release of genetically modified insects, mammals, and...Read “New Project: Public Deliberation on Gene Editing in the Wild”
Hastings Center News
How Can Bioethics Help Mitigate Climate Change? Hastings Center Explores Options
How might bioethics help address the threats posed by climate change? A Hastings Center meeting scoped out the options.Read “How Can Bioethics Help Mitigate Climate Change? Hastings Center Explores Options”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Living Good and Healthy Lives on a Changing Earth: What Should Bioethics Do?
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.Read “Living Good and Healthy Lives on a Changing Earth: What Should Bioethics Do?”
Hastings Center News
Hastings Center’s Rosemary Gibson Honored for Enhancing Health Care Quality
Read “Hastings Center’s Rosemary Gibson Honored for Enhancing Health Care Quality”
Hastings Center News
Addressing Structural Injustice: A Call to Action for Bioethics
Tremendous wealth beside abject poverty, a widening income gap, the vast disparity between the life prospects of a black child and a white child -- structural injustices are pervasive in our country and many places in the world. What does bioethics have to say about these problems? The Hastings Center has committed to intensifying it efforts to address structural injustices. Ideas for doing so emerged in a plenary session organized by Hastings at the annual meeting of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities.Read “Addressing Structural Injustice: A Call to Action for Bioethics”
Hastings Center News
What’s Next for an Aging America: Palliative Care Leaders Assess the Future
The Collaborative for Palliative Care, in partnership with The Hastings Center, University of Rochester Finger Lakes Geriatrics Education Center (FLGEC), and Calvary Hospital, will host its annual conference this December 11th at Iona College, New Rochelle, N.Y., titled The Next Generation of Palliative Care: Integrating Palliative and Social Ethics of Care.”Read “What’s Next for an Aging America: Palliative Care Leaders Assess the Future”
Bioethics Forum Essay
What Is Ethical Eating in the Age of Climate Change?
Are we ethically obliged to eat less meat? Bioethicists consider that question, and their role in addressing it.Hastings Center News
Hastings Center Scholars Respond to Prison Sentence of Researcher Who Created First Gene-Edited Babies
The Compassionate Use Advisory Committee, headed by Hastings Center Fellow Arthur Caplan, of NYU Langone, received the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the Food and Drug Administration’s Innovation Award. The committee was recognized for transforming how expanded access requests, also known as compassionate use requests, are granted by drug developers.Bioethics Forum Essay
Report from China: Ethical Questions on the Response to the Coronavirus
Hastings Center fellows in China discuss ethical questions about the response to the spreading coronavirus.Read “Report from China: Ethical Questions on the Response to the Coronavirus”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Chinese Bioethicists: Silencing Doctor Impeded Early Control of Coronavirus
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.Read “Chinese Bioethicists: Silencing Doctor Impeded Early Control of Coronavirus”
Bioethics Forum Essay
When Endemic Disparities Catch the Pandemic Flu: Echoes of Kubler-Ross and Rawls
Read “When Endemic Disparities Catch the Pandemic Flu: Echoes of Kubler-Ross and Rawls”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Coronavirus and the Crisis of Trust
Influenza and coronavirus cause similar symptoms probably through similar modes of transmission. What is unique about coronavirus is that misinformation, missteps, conspiracies, and cover-ups have left their mark on public trust.Bioethics Forum Essay
COVID: Collective of Voices in Distress
Bioethics Forum Essay
COVID-19 and the Global Ethics Freefall
Since the initial outbreak in Wuhan last December, the national and global responses to COVID-19 have been in ethics freefall.Bioethics Forum Essay
Flattening the Curve, Then What?
Bioethics Forum Essay
U.S. and Canada: Being Good Neighbors in the Pandemic
Canada has a fraction of the number of cases of Covid-19 as the U.S. Canadians feel vulnerable. But Canadians and Americans need to find ways to build and maintain trust within and across our borders.Read “U.S. and Canada: Being Good Neighbors in the Pandemic”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Religion During the Coronavirus Pandemic: Islamic Bioethical Perspectives
Congregational rituals of religious communities around the world have attracted attention for their possible threat of spreading the coronavirus. Negative Media coverage has generally depicted members of religious communities as more or less “reckless” groups whose “fanatic” convictions can make them harm others from inside or outside their religious traditions. However, what hasn’t been discussed is how this issue should be approached as a complex bioethical issue that concerns people worldwide. With the beginning of Ramadan, paying attention to the nuances and complexities of this issue becomes especially pressing.Read “Religion During the Coronavirus Pandemic: Islamic Bioethical Perspectives”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Report from Sub-Saharan Africa: “When the Health Fundamentals Are Weak, Covid Will Expose You.”
The cries of millions of people in Sub-Saharan Africa and in low- and middle-income countries elsewhere who are struggling to stay alive because of Covid-19 and the lockdowns call for us to revisit the conceptual framework of the human right to health.Bioethics Forum Essay
Human Challenge Studies for Covid-19 Vaccine: Questions about Benefits and Risks
Experts in infectious disease and public health warn that the Covid-19 pandemic will be with us until there is an effective vaccine, possibly 12 to 18 months in the future. This situation has given rise to calls for human challenge studies, in which healthy volunteers are injected with an experimental vaccine and then infected with the disease to test the vaccine’s efficacy. Is this ethically justifiable?Read “Human Challenge Studies for Covid-19 Vaccine: Questions about Benefits and Risks”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Bringing Ethics into the Global Coronavirus Response
Covid-19 is a matter of public and global health ethics, and the pandemic is currently accelerating cooperation within and contributions from these fields. A meeting on June 27, hosted by the European Union and Global Citizen, is the latest example another global pledging event on June 27, will include governments and large institutions, as well as individuals and communities worldwide.Bioethics Forum Essay
Accepting the Challenge: Covid Vaccine Challenge Trials Can Be Ethically Justified
The Covid-19 pandemic is unlikely to end until there is a safe, effective, and widely distributed vaccine. How soon can researchers achieve this goal? The answer largely depends on which strategies researchers are willing to adopt. One potential strategy is to conduct human challenge studies, in which researchers give an experimental vaccine to healthy volunteers and then test—or “challenge”—the vaccine by purposely exposing volunteers to the virus. Although a growing number of voices are calling on researchers to employ this strategy, the proposal is generating a heated debate about the ethics of such research.Read “Accepting the Challenge: Covid Vaccine Challenge Trials Can Be Ethically Justified”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Is the Coronavirus Pandemic Accelerating Bioethics Nationalism?
The global crisis created by the coronavirus pandemic and the rush to create and distribute a vaccine widely hoped to be a “silver bullet” that can facilitate a return to “normalcy” threatens to upend seven decades of assumptions about bioethical norms.Read “Is the Coronavirus Pandemic Accelerating Bioethics Nationalism?”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Volunteering for a Covid Vaccine Trial: Fulfilling Hindu Obligations or Fostering Pharmaceutical Company Profits?
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.Bioethics Forum Essay
Human Plasma and Bioethics Nationalism
The procurement of human plasma as a potential therapy for Covid-19 is one of the latest examples of bioethics nationalism, defined by Jonathan Moreno in this blog as “distinct bioethics standards [which] are formally proclaimed as a matter of right by a sovereign state.” The race for a Covid cure pushes at the weak seams in the international liberal order in much the same way that Covid appears to be pushing at health care systems.Hastings Center News
Protecting Communities from Covid-19
FOUR STEPS TO PROTECT COMMUNITIES FROM COVID-19 AND RESTORE THE ECONOMY The Hastings Center, the oldest independent, nonpartisan research institute in the world focused on social and ethical issues in...Bioethics Forum Essay
Global Allocation of Coronavirus Vaccines
A Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech has received emergency authorization in the United States and has been authorized in the countries, and a vaccine by Moderna is likely to be authorized soon. In spite of this good news, at least for the first couple of years, Covid-19 vaccines will be a scarce resource. Because low-income countries are likely to lose out in the scramble to get access to them, there have been calls for global solidarity. While equitable allocation of vaccines around the world would be ideal, it is unrealistic as a near-term goal.Bioethics Forum Essay
Coronavirus Mutation Panic
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?Bioethics Forum Essay
Efficacy is Relative in a Public Health Crisis: Evaluating the Next Wave of Covid-19 Vaccines
A third Covid vaccine candidate moving closer to potential FDA authorization is less effective than the two Covid vaccines already authorized in the United States. Is it ethical to offer a vaccine with lower efficacy? Is it ethical not to offer it in a public health emergency?Read “Efficacy is Relative in a Public Health Crisis: Evaluating the Next Wave of Covid-19 Vaccines”
Bioethics Forum Essay
WHO-China Report on Covid: Important Step Forward, More to Be Done
The World Health Organization recently released a long-anticipated report on SARS-CoV-2 origins, based on 28 days of field research and site visits in China conducted jointly by 17 international and...Read “WHO-China Report on Covid: Important Step Forward, More to Be Done”
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Transcript | Vaccine Access, Vaccine Hesitancy: Challenges to Herd Immunity
A HASTINGS CENTER CONVERSATION WITH RHEA BOYD, MAYA GOLDENBERG, AND MILDRED SOLOMON The Hastings Center hosted “Vaccine Access, Vaccine Hesitancy: Challenges to Herd Immunity,” an online discussion of the ethical issues related...Read “Transcript | Vaccine Access, Vaccine Hesitancy: Challenges to Herd Immunity”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Nope. A Covid-19 Travel Pass isn’t Just like the Yellow Card.
Citing the Yellow Card as precedent for Covid-19 travel passes that exempt those with proof of vaccination from testing and quarantine mandates when crossing certain borders is an erroneous policy assumption that could prolong the pandemic and imperil global health.Read “Nope. A Covid-19 Travel Pass isn’t Just like the Yellow Card.”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Instead of Vaccine Passports, Let’s Push for Global Justice in Vaccine Access
In Costa Rica, where I live, only 24% of the population has received at least one vaccine dose because we have received very small amounts of vaccines. The Costa Rican president suggested that every person who can travel to the U.S. to get the jab, should do it. Vaccine tourism, then, seems to be another promising business opportunity for the powerful countries that have accumulated vaccines instead of redistributing them soon and fairly.Read “Instead of Vaccine Passports, Let’s Push for Global Justice in Vaccine Access”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Covid Vaccine Patent Waivers are for Health Sovereignty
The United States, Russia, and China support temporary patent waivers for Covid vaccines. The waivers, which need support from other countries, would likely save lives in low- and middle-income countries.Read “Covid Vaccine Patent Waivers are for Health Sovereignty”
Bioethics Forum Essay
Capitalist Philanthropy and Vaccine Imperialism
The commitments made by the wealthiest countries to share Covid vaccines and funding for international cooperation mechanisms are crucial, but insufficient. They reflect the “securitization of health,” a 21st century phenomenon whereby states turn health issues into national security issues.Page
ANA and AMA join AAMC and The Hastings Center as sponsors of “Righting the Wrongs: Tackling Health Inequities”
NEW YORK/SILVER SPRING/CHICAGO, NOVEMBER 9 – The American Nurses Association and the American Medical Association join The Hastings Center, a global ethics leader, and the Association of American Medical Colleges Center...Page
Caste Author Isabel Wilkerson to Keynote National Forum, “Righting the Wrongs: Tackling Health Inequities.”
The Hastings Center and the Association of American Medical Colleges Center for Health Justice Announce Two-Day Summit on Health Equity. SEPTEMBER 15, 2021 — The Hastings Center, a global ethics...Page
AHA and ABIMF join as sponsors of “Righting the Wrongs: Tackling Health Inequities”
The American Hospital Association and the ABIM Foundation join with the American Medical Association and the American Nurses Association as sponsors of January’s national summit on health equity, convened by...Read “AHA and ABIMF join as sponsors of “Righting the Wrongs: Tackling Health Inequities””
Bioethics Forum Essay
Global Health Justice: Now Is the Time
The recognition of the social injustices surrounding the pandemic is an important opportunity to understand the longstanding links between health and social and global justice.Bioethics Forum Essay
Resilience and the Twin Medical Catastrophes of War and Pandemic
As I sit here in my office at the Slovak Medical University in Bratislava, my colleagues are experiencing great moral anguish because of Russia’s invasion of neighboring Ukraine. Simultaneously, we are also confronting the Omicron wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. The war complicates and burdens health care here and in other border nations exponentially, and especially so in combination with the pandemic.Read “Resilience and the Twin Medical Catastrophes of War and Pandemic”
Hastings Center News
Report Examines Racism & Health, Calls on Bioethics to Lead Change
A new Hastings Center special report calls on the field of bioethics to take the lead in efforts to remedy racial injustice and health inequities in the United States. As...Read “Report Examines Racism & Health, Calls on Bioethics to Lead Change”
Hastings Center News
12 Outstanding Scholars Recognized for Work in Ethics of Disability, Transplantation, Mental Health Care, and Other Areas
The Hastings Center is pleased to announce the election of 12 new fellows. Hastings Center fellows are a group of more than 200 individuals of outstanding accomplishment whose work has...Bioethics Forum Essay
Financing Reforms to Meet a Pivotal Moment in Global Health
This year will be the most important moment for global health since WHO’s founding in 1948, but only if states give major reforms their full political and financial backing.Read “Financing Reforms to Meet a Pivotal Moment in Global Health”