The author works at the Ethox Centre and the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and the Humanities University of Oxford.
"Abstract
The global response to the recent coronavirus pandemic has revealed an ethical crisis in public health. This article analyses key pandemic public health policies in light of widely accepted ethical principles: the need for evidence, the least restrictive/harmful alternative, proportionality, equity, reciprocity, due legal process, and transparency. Many policies would be considered unacceptable according to prepandemic norms of public health ethics. There are thus significant opportunities to develop more ethical responses to future pandemics...
Conclusion
Considering many of responses to the Covid19 pandemic in light of the principles of public health ethics leads to some sobering conclusions. During the pandemic, the moral value of health often became narrowly aligned with the avoidance of one particular virus while mental health and other harms increased, socioeconomic inequalities were exacerbated, and civil liberties were subject to sometimes draconian limitations. The interests of children were in multiple ways sacrificed, often with no strong justification, in the name of reducing harm from a virus that poses extremely low risks to healthy children. Inequality skyrocketed; the benefits of public health interventions and their economic effects overwhelmingly accumulated to the rich while the poor benefited little, were often harmed, and were sometimes placed at higher risk of infection. There was a lack of evidence that the benefits of many NPIs [non-pharmaceutical interventions] outweighed their harms, and a widespread failure to collect such evidence in an unbiased way. Transparency and legal checks on power were often limited.
Policing was excessive. Rather than the 'least restrictive alternative,' populations experienced extreme levels of coercive control during lockdowns. Taken together, these failures risk undermining trust in public health and science, and the unchecked use of public health power (or prolonged states of emergency) risks undermining democracy itself.
Policies instituted during the covid19 pandemic provide many important case studies for ethical analysis. This Special Issue includes extended analyses of policies including lockdowns, school closures, border closures, and the use of fear in public health. It is hoped that better understanding of what went wrong, ethically speaking during the last few years, might help to inform more balanced and proportionate responses to future pandemics."
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