HASTINGS CONVERSATIONS: A SERIES Although roughly 60% of adults in the United States have had at least one Covid vaccine shot, many Americans remain reluctant, or outright opposed, to getting vaccinated. This hesitancy poses a major hurdle to achieving herd immunity. Therefore, some experts reco...

Many Latin American countries are being devastated by excessive loss of life from Covid-19, many sectors of society falling below the poverty line, and health systems being overwhelmed. As collateral damage, some countries in the region are witnessing an eruption of populism and autocratic trends and an increasing erosion of already weak and unstable democracies. Can bioethics be a useful tool for managing this crisis? Argentina provides a case study.

The C.D.C.'s latest policy guidance that people who have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus virus no longer need to wear face masks indoors gets the science right, but policymaking wrong.

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 to vaccine access and hesitancy in the United State...

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 WHO experts and 17 Chinese counterparts. The report assessed possible pathways for the transmission o...

As communities across the world work to navigate the pandemic, The Hastings Center has assembled ethics resources for responding to novel coronavirus Covid-19. We are updating this hub throughout the crisis.

In his recent JAMA article, Donald Berwick eloquently describes what he termed the “moral determinants of health,” by which he meant a strong sense of social solidarity in which people in the United States would “depend on each other for securing the basic circumstances of healthy lives,” reflecting a “moral law within.” Berwick’s work should serve as a call to action for bioethicists and clinical ethicists to consider what they can do to be forces of broad moral change in their institutions.

As hospitals and public health authorities devise triage protocols to allocate scarce critical-care resources during the Covid-19 pandemic, people with disabilities are expressing alarm that these protocols devalue them and exacerbate long-entrenched ableism in health care. Lawsuits alleging disability discrimination in have been filed in Washington and Alabama. The U.S. Office for Civil Rights is investigating disability discrimination complaints in triage protocols. The challenge is to develop protocols that will minimize discrimination in the health care system.

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.

While patients can and do recover from coronavirus infections, there are currently no approved treatments that are known to work against COVID-19.

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

Like most New Yorkers, I take the subway to work. I commute from Brooklyn to my office in Manhattan. By the time I get on the train, there are no seats available. It is nearly assured I will be standing inches away from a stranger.

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.