- Bioethics Forum Essay
Motivated Ignorance: A Challenge for Science Communication and Democracy
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayMany people are deeply interested in the political process and awash in relevant information., but nevertheless often grossly misinformed, holding confident but unfounded opinions at odds with widely accessible evidence The recent riot at Capitol Hill is just one illustration–albeit a horrifying one–of such misinformation and its potential consequences. The anti-vaccine movement is another example.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Resisting Public Health Measures, Then and Now
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayOne 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?Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Protecting Communities from COVID-19
Read the Post Public Trust in Science
Read the PostHASTINGS CONVERSATIONS: A SERIES Dr. Anthony Fauci explored the ethical issues raised by the erosion of trust in science in a new virtual discussion hosted by The Hastings Center. The nation’s top infectious diseases official and Hastings president Mildred Solomon looked at how we can improve ...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 PostBioethics Forum EssayPhysicians 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?Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Lawsuits of Last Resort: Employees Fight for Safe Workplaces during Covid-19
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Pandemic Language
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayLanguage 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Social-Change Games Can Help Us Understand the Public Health Choices We Face
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayBefore 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
After the Surge: Prioritizing the Backlog of Delayed Hospital Procedures
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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?Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Individual Freedom or Public Health? A False Choice in the Covid Era
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayWhen 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?Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Beyond the Covid Crisis—A New Social Contract with Public Health
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Show Me Your Passport: Ethical Concerns About Covid-19 Antibody Testing as Key to Reopening Public Life
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAround 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. .Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Ethics and Evidence in the Search for a Vaccine and Treatments for Covid-19
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn 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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
U.S. and Canada: Being Good Neighbors in the Pandemic
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The Price of Going Back to Work Too Soon
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayPresident 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
We Need International Medical Graduates to Help Fight Covid-19. Immigration Policies Keep Them Away
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAs 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...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
America’s Bioethicists and Health Care Leaders: Government Must Use Federal Powers To Fight COVID-19
Read the PostHastings Center NewsNearly 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.Read the Post - Hastings Center News
The Hastings Center Produces Guidance for Ethical Practice in Responding to COVID-19
Read the PostHastings Center NewsThe 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.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Coronavirus Response Is Insufficient for Vulnerable New Yorkers
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Health Care for Obesity and Eating Disorders: What Needs to Change
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe theme of National Eating Disorder Awareness (NEDA) week , “Come as you are: Hindsight is 20-20,” is designed to encourage those recovering from eating disorders to reflect on their journeys towards body acceptance. It also affords doctors and other health professionals an opportunity to evaluate how well they are doing to help patients reach this goal.Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Report from China: Ethical Questions on the Response to the Coronavirus
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Hastings Center’s Rosemary Gibson Honored for Enhancing Health Care Quality
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The Public Charge Rule Is a Eugenic Policy
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayLast week, the Department of Homeland Security announced the final public charge rule, which revises the interpretation of “public charge” in the Immigration and Nationality Act. Under the Final Rule, DHS may find applicants ineligible for a visa for admission to the U.S. or a green card grant...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
From Outcry to Solidarity with Migrants: What Is the Good We Can Do?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAnother 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 the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Forced from Home: Evicting Immigrants from Public Housing Harms Children’s Health
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Staying in Their Lane: Health Professionals Must Address Gun Violence
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn the wake of the recent Twitter fight between the National Rifle Association and U.S. physician groups over whether doctors should speak out about firearm policy issues, we argue that professionalism actually requires that doctors take a leadership role in gun policy debates, even if (in fact, espe...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
New Project: Public Deliberation on Gene Editing in the Wild
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Immigrant Health and the Moral Scandal of the “Public Charge” Rule
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayA long-anticipated policy change proposed by the Trump administration that would count the use of many federally-subsidized programs against immigrants currently eligible to use them threatens public health and would undermine ethical practice in health professions and systems.Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Should Gene-Edited Mice Be Released to Control Lyme Disease?
Read the PostHastings Center NewsHastings Center research scholar Carolyn P. Neuhaus participated in a panel discussion on Martha’s Vineyard on July 12 to discuss a proposal to release genetically modified mice to curb the spread of Lyme disease and other tick-borne illnesses. A Netflix film crew recorded the event, which featured...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Newspaper Op-Eds Should Disclose Authors’ Industry Ties
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayEarlier this month, The Seattle Times published an op-ed by Samuel Browd, medical director of Seattle Children’s Sport Concussion Program, on the risks of brain injury in youth sports. Dr. Browd acknowledged troubling research on the dangers of repetitive brain trauma, but also emphasized that mil...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
The Only PhD Scientist in Congress Speaks About Truth, Politics, and Human Flourishing
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAt a time when facts are distorted, disregarded, and ignored in policy making and political discourse, the need in Washington for seekers and defenders of truth has perhaps never been greater. I discussed the state of affairs with Representative Bill Foster, a Democrat from Illinois who prides himsel...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Is it Time to Regulate the Sale of Sugar to Minors?
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayIn “Tackling Obesity and Disease: The Culprit Is Sugar; the Response is Legal Regulation,” published in the Hastings Center Report, Lawrence O. Gostin describes four coordinated interventions that have been effective at controlling peoples’ tobacco consumption and which can serve as a “powerf...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Questions About Conscientious Objection in Health Care
Read the PostHastings Center NewsIn January the Department of Health and Human Services acted to increase enforcement of laws that permit doctors and other health care workers to refuse to provide services such as abortion because of moral or religious objections. A new Conscience and Religious Freedom Division in the department’s...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
After Hurricane Harvey, Injustice in Houston
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayHurricane Harvey dissipated in September, but much of the destruction that it wreaked on Texas and Louisiana remains. When addressing residential concerns, disaster relief officials prioritize the newly homeless over the chronically homeless, choosing to protect the previously privileged over the unp...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
Hastings Center Scholar Addresses Implications of CDC Avoiding Seven Words
Read the PostHastings Center NewsVulnerable. Entitlement. Diversity. Transgender. Fetus. Evidence-based. Science-based. Last week, news outlets reported that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been advised to avoid using these seven words in budget documents. In an interview with Medscape Hastings Center research sc...Read the Post - Hastings Center News
What Do We Owe Frail Older People?
Read the PostHastings Center NewsA woman juggles caring for her aged father at home and going to work. A volunteer cares for an 83-year-old man who lives alone and wonders why the man’s son doesn’t take more of an interest. Staff members at a nursing home, discussing a patient with dementia who hits staff members, wonder if it...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
After the Election Bioethics Faces a Rocky Road
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAcademic bioethics has never been popular with Republicans. Libertarians dislike academic bioethics because it seems too elitist and anti-free market. Religious thinkers worry it is technocratic, soulless and crassly utilitarian. Now with Trumpism add a populist disdain for expertise, experts and t...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Lincoln’s Promise: Congress, Veterans, and Traumatic Brain Injury
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayPerhaps we were naïve. Our plan was relatively simple: we would chart the legislative evolution of programs for veterans with traumatic brain injuries (TBI) to identify policy gaps for this underserved and vulnerable population. With recent media attention highlighting the U.S. Department of Veteran...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
The Good of the Body
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe December 2015 United Nations meeting on climate change was an historic moment for global efforts to reduce harmful carbon emissions. While it gained the agreement about the future good of the planet, it made clear that there is a long and hard road still ahead. Yet another global challenge is ...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Responding to Zika: Ethical Challenges of Zoonotic Diseases
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayThe 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Responding to Ebola: Health Care Professionals’ Obligations to Provide Care
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayAs 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...Read the Post - Bioethics Forum Essay
Belief in a Just World: A Case Study in Public Health Ethics
Read the PostBioethics Forum EssayWhy did portraying a married, working, loving, family-oriented, and religious couple with a disabled child bring out consistently negative reactions among the public toward allowing this family access to government-subsidized health care for their children? The answer may lie in a study by the Nation...Read the Post