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Pandemic Planning

  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Resisting Public Health Measures, Then and Now

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    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?
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  • Bioethics Forum Essay

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

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    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.
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  • Bioethics Forum Essay

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

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    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.
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  • Bioethics Forum Essay

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

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    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.
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  • Bioethics Forum Essay

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

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    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.
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  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Please Don’t (Need to) Use My Work

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    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.
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  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Crowdfunding for Covid-Related Needs: Unfair and Inadequate

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    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.
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  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    COVID-19 and the Global Ethics Freefall

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

    COVID: Collective of Voices in Distress

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    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 ...
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  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Coronavirus and the Crisis of Trust

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    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.
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  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Responding to Zika: Ethical Challenges of Zoonotic Diseases

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    Bioethics Forum Essay
    The World Health Organization will hold an emergency committee meeting on the pandemic reemergence of Zika virus and the explosive increase in reported cases of congenital microcephaly in Brazil possibly linked to Zika on February 1. The virus is a mosquito-borne infection in the same family as Wes...
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  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Responding to Ebola: Fostering Transparency and Inclusivity

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    Bioethics Forum Essay
    Media reports indicate that seven individuals have received ZMapp to date, two of whom have died. The first recipients were two American health care workers from Liberia who were treated and airlifted to Atlanta last month. This is commendable – an outstanding example of the duty of rescue owed by ...
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  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Lessons from Ebola: Presidential Bioethics Commission Releases Recommendations on Preparedness for Public Health Emergencies

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    Bioethics Forum Essay
    This week the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues released a brief, Ethics and Ebola: Public Health Planning and Response,to the administration and the public on ethical preparedness for public health emergency response, with a focus on the U.S. response to the current Ebola e...
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  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Measles, Vaccination, and the Tragedy of the Commons

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    Bioethics Forum Essay
    After having been virtually eliminated in the United States in the year 2000, measles have made a comeback, with nearly 150 cases in 17 states and nearly 30 confirmed cases of the illness in the Canadian provinces of Ontario, Quebec, and Manitoba.
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  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Vaccine Exemptions and the Church-State Problem

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    Bioethics Forum Essay
    The current measles outbreak has brought public attention to the ease with which vaccine exemptions are available. As the media continually inform us, 48 states allow for religious exemptions, while 19 states also offer exemptions based on some sort of personal philosophy. The New York Times feature...
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  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Responding to Ebola: Health Care Professionals’ Obligations to Provide Care

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    Bioethics Forum Essay
    As health care institutions in the United States prepare for Ebola patients, many have adopted the policy that those providing hands-on care should come from a pool of volunteers. Given the mixed history of health care providers’ willingness to care for patients during epidemics and pandemics, an...
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  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Responding to Ebola: Misplaced Police Powers

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    Bioethics Forum Essay
    A number of states have recently adopted mandatory quarantine measures, including New York and New Jersey, for any individual entering the United States who had direct contact with someone infected with Ebola. This policy has most notably affected health care workers with Médecins Sans Frontiè...
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  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Responding to Ebola: The Question of Quarantine

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    Bioethics Forum Essay
    Dr. Craig Spencer, the first person in New York confirmed to have Ebola, is a clearly dedicated and selfless physician who worked for Doctors Without Borders in West Africa helping to take care of people critically ill with Ebola. As is well known by now, before showing signs of the Ebola virus, he t...
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  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Responding to Ebola: Questions about Resuscitation

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    Bioethics Forum Essay
    While details of the deaths of patients in Dallas and Madrid from Ebola are not public, their passing prompts questions about resuscitation in individuals infected with the virus. To date, this question has not been raised in clinical ethics. We must now consider whether unilateral do-not-resuscitate...
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  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Responding to Ebola: Retrofitting Governance Systems

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    Bioethics Forum Essay
    In a recent New York Times op-ed, David Brooks observes that governance, in the form of multilateral organizing, is missing from the response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Unfortunately, global organization and health infrastructure building too often occur in the midst of a public healt...
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  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Responding to Ebola: Organizational Ethics, Frontline Perspectives

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    Bioethics Forum Essay
    Beyond crucial questions of fair access to scarce supplies of the experimental drug ZMapp and to other potentially effective drugs to treat Ebola, commentators from bioethics, public health, journalism, and other sectors are increasingly focused on “staff, stuff, and systems.” The consequences ...
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  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Responding to Ebola: Selected Commentaries on Key Ethical Questions

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    Bioethics Forum Essay
    The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is the largest and deadliest on record, and the crisis is evolving rapidly. More than 2,200 people have been infected in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, and Nigeria, and more than half have died. The response to the epidemic has raised ethical questions about the fa...
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  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    New York’s Measles Outbreak: Take Off Your Shoes and Roll Up Your Sleeve

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    Bioethics Forum Essay
    Today’s New York Times reported a rare outbreak of measles in New York City. Because the disease was mostly eradicated by 2000, most clinicians were baffled by the high fevers, rash, and respiratory ailments associated with the illness.
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  • Bioethics Forum Essay

    Romanian Orphans: A Reconsideration of the Ethics of the Bucharest Early Intervention Project

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    Bioethics Forum Essay
    Recently I had a Susan Reverby moment. Reverby is the Wellesley historian best known for unearthing the revelations of the Guatemalan syphilis and gonorrhea studies conducted by the United States Public Health Service and the Pan American Health Organization in the late 1940s. As the now famous ...
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