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COVID-19: Ethical Dilemmas

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Covid-19: Health Disparities and Ethical Challenges Across the Globe

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Abstract

The COVID pandemic raised several significant ethical issues, including life and death dilemmas. Bioethics is a relatively new discipline. There are, however, several commonly accepted models for addressing clinical issues in healthcare such as deontology, utilitarianism, principlism, and virtue ethics. Public health ethics is not as well developed as the ethical guidelines for clinical decision-making. Public health, by definition, is concerned with population-level well-being. As a result, utilitarianism is frequently a guiding ethical principle. Another ethical model applied to populations when allocating limited resources is John Rawls’ approach to distributive justice. Rationing of care became essential in many countries around the world during COVID-19. These systems for allocating limited healthcare resources elicited the scrutiny of clinicians, policymakers, public health professionals, and ethicists. Use of criteria such as age, pre-existing medical conditions, and status as a healthcare worker to allocate intensive care unit beds, ventilators, and access to newly developed vaccines triggered considerable controversy. Additionally, prevailing algorithms did not consider pre-existing health disparities resulting in discrimination against many minority groups.

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    H. Russell Searight

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Searight, H.R. (2023). COVID-19: Ethical Dilemmas. In: Searight, H.R. (eds) Covid-19: Health Disparities and Ethical Challenges Across the Globe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-26200-5_7

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