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.

In most ways, 2023 was a return to normal. Schools were fully back in person; hybrid work was old hat; travel rebounded. But people are easily agitated. I think in our desire to regain a sense of normalcy we have not grieved properly for the losses and hardships of the past four years.

With ventilator support, Ms. J would have a 50% chance of making a full recovery. Without it she would almost certainly die. That notwithstanding, Ms. J declined to consent to the ventilator.

Since before the pandemic we have been experiencing a breakdown in trust in science and health care. Explore the reasons for this crisis, with authors of a just-released Hastings Center special...

In its early days, bioethics emphasized patient autonomy in the doctor-patient relationship. But patient autonomy is not the be-all and end-all principle to follow in all health care settings. Especially in lethal, airborne infectious disease pandemics.

Quiet quitting, the trend in which people do only the minimum in their jobs, has captured attention in the news and on social media. More than half of U.S. workers are quiet quitting, according to a recent Gallup poll, and most of them are in their 20s and 30s. I was discussing this trend with my bioethics colleagues, and we considered the ethical implications for people’s well-being.

President Biden recently declared that the Covid-19 “pandemic is over.”  Some public health experts agreed with this assessment; others disagreed.  What cannot be disputed is that nearly 12,000 Americans have...

As mask mandates are rolled back and friends and neighbors debate the risks and benefits of masks and the merits or permissibility of mandating their use, we can catch a glimpse of the considerable extent to which values depend heavily on something other than pure reason. It’s a bit disappointing, perhaps. But it might be a useful lesson for democracy.

Caregivers are not visitors. Hospital policies that restrict visits from family caregivers can harm patients.

When Covid-19 vaccines first became available last year, Somali Muslims in Minnesota--the largest Somali Muslim population in North America-- were fearful and, consequently, their vaccination rate was low and their Covid-19 rate was high. But health professionals and community representatives worked together to understand and overcome their vaccine hesitancy.

News of the first transplant of a pig’s heart into a human raises hope that the procedure could one day help alleviate the shortage of organs. But before we forge ahead with xenotransplantation trials, we should be concerned about several issues: the potential to spread pathogens, exploitation of human research participants, and animal welfare.

States and school boards around the country are engaged in a debate about whether to require middle and high school students to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19. The debate is not so much about whether to mandate. It's when to do so.

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.

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...

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.

The Covid-19 outbreak has forced health care providers, administrative officials, and the general public to each play their part in doing no harm to others. It may come as a surprise to many people, but health care workers may unknowingly spread Covid-19 in their communities simply by wearing scrubs in public.

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.

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.