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Healthcare, Responsibility, and Golden Opportunities

Written by Gabriel De Marco

This blog post is based on a co-authored paper (w. Tom Douglas and Julian Savulescu) recently published in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice.

 

When it comes to determining how healthcare resources should be allocated, there are many factors that could—and perhaps should—be taken into account. One such factor is a patient’s responsibility for his or her illness, or for the behavior that caused it; e.g. whether a lifetime smoker is responsible for developing his lung cancer, or whether someone is responsible for heart disease on the basis of having an unhealthy diet. Policies that take responsibility for the unhealthy lifestyle or its outcomes into account—responsibility-sensitive policies, or RSPs, for short—have been a matter of debate for some time.

Read More »Healthcare, Responsibility, and Golden Opportunities

Compromising On the Right Not to Know?

Written by Ben Davies

Personal autonomy is the guiding light of contemporary clinical and research practice, at least in the UK. Whether someone is a potential participant in a research trial, or a patient being treated by a medical professional, the gold standard, violated only in extremis, is that they should decide for themselves whether to go ahead with a particular intervention, on the basis of as much relevant information as possible.

Roger Crisp recently discussed Professor Gopal Sreenivasan’s New Cross seminar, which argued against a requirement for informational disclosure in consenting to research participation. Sreenivasan’s argument was, at least in its first part, based on a straightforward appeal to autonomy: if autonomy is what matters most, I should have the right to autonomously refuse information.

I have previously outlined a related argument in a clinical context, in which I sought to undermine arguments against a putative ‘Right Not to Know’ that are themselves based in autonomy. In brief, my argument is, firstly, that a decision can itself be autonomous without promoting the agent’s future or overall autonomy and, second, that even if there is an autonomy-based moral duty to hear relevant information (as scholars such as Rosamond Rhodes argue), we can still have a right that people not force us to hear such information.

In a recent paper, Julian Savulescu and I go further into the details of the Right Not to Know, setting out the scope for a degree of compromise between the two central camps.

Read More »Compromising On the Right Not to Know?

Is Life-Sustaining Treatment Being Lawfully Withdrawn From Patients In Prolonged Disorders Of Consciousness? Nobody Seems To Know

By Charles Foster

From the time of the decision of the House of Lords in Airedale NHS Trust v Bland (1993) until the decision of the Supreme Court in An NHS Trust v Y (2018) (which I will refer to here as ‘Y”) it had been understood that the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment (typically clinically assisted nutrition and hydration – ‘CANH’) from patients in a vegetative state should be endorsed by the court. Over the years, this practice had been extended to cover such withdrawals in Minimally Conscious States too.

In Y, the Supreme Court held that there was no requirement for court review or endorsement. Why?Read More »Is Life-Sustaining Treatment Being Lawfully Withdrawn From Patients In Prolonged Disorders Of Consciousness? Nobody Seems To Know

Lockdown Erodes Agency

By Charles Foster

A couple of lockdown conversations:

  1. The other day I met a friend in the street. We hadn’t seen one another for over a year. We mimed the hugs that we would have given in a saner age, and started to talk. ‘There’s nothing to tell you’, she said. ‘Nothing’s happened since we last saw you. And that’s just as well, because, as you’ll find, I’ve forgotten how to talk, how to relate, and how to read ordinary cues. We’ve not been out. We’ve not changed anything. I wonder if we’ve been changed?’
  1. Another friend. ‘Zoom’s great, isn’t it? You switch off your camera and your microphone, and the meeting just goes on perfectly happily without you. Everyone thinks you’re there. Your name’s up on their screen. But you are just getting on with your own business.’

And a lockdown fact: Lockdown has been great for book sales. 2020 saw an estimated rise of 5.2% in volume sales of print books in the UK compared with 2019 sales. This was the biggest annual rise since 2007: Read More »Lockdown Erodes Agency

Crosspost: Learning to live with COVID – the tough choices ahead

By Jonathan Pugh, Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu

This work was supported by the UKRI/ AHRC funded UK Ethics Accelerator project, grant number AH/V013947/1. The UK Ethics Accelerator project can be found at https://ukpandemicethics.org/

 

As mass vaccination continues to be rolled out, the UK is beginning to see encouraging signs that the number of COVID deaths is reducing, and that the vaccines may be reducing the transmission of coronavirus.

While this is very welcome news, a mass vaccination programme is unlikely to be enough to eliminate the virus, so we need to turn our thoughts towards the ethics of the long-term management of COVID-19.

One strategy would be to aim for the elimination of the virus within the UK. New Zealand successfully implemented an elimination strategy earlier in the pandemic and is now in a post-elimination stage.

An elimination strategy in the UK would require combining the mass vaccination programme with severe restrictions on international travel to stop new cases and variants of the virus being imported. However, the government has been reluctant to endorse an elimination strategy, given the importance of international trade to the UK economy.

One of the main alternatives to the elimination strategy is to treat coronavirus as endemic to the UK and to aim for long-term suppression of the virus to acceptable levels. But adopting a suppression strategy for the long term will require us to make a societal decision about the harms we are and are not willing to accept.

 

Read More »Crosspost: Learning to live with COVID – the tough choices ahead

Mandating COVID-19 Vaccination for Children

Written by Lisa Forsberg and Anthony Skelton

In many countries vaccine rollouts are now well underway. Vaccine programmes in Israel, the United Kingdom, Chile, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and the United States have been particularly successful. Mass vaccination is vital to ending the pandemic. However, at present, vaccines are typically not approved for children under the age of 16. Full protection from COVID-19 at a population level will not be achieved until most children and adolescents are inoculated against the deadly disease. A number of pharmaceutical companies have started or will soon start clinical trials to test the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccinations in children and adolescents. Initial results of clinical trials seem promising (see also here and here).

There are strong reasons to inoculate children. COVID-19 may harm or kill them. It disproportionately affects already disadvantaged populations. For example, a CDC study published in August 2020 found the hospitalisation rate to be five times higher for Black children and eight times higher for Latino children than it is for white children. In addition, inoculating children is necessary for establishing herd immunity and (perhaps more importantly), as Jeremy Samuel Faust and Angela L. Rasmussen explained in the New York Times, preventing the virus from spreading and mutating ‘into more dangerous variants, including ones that could harm both children and adults’. Read More »Mandating COVID-19 Vaccination for Children

Ethics Doesn’t Rule, OK?

By Charles Foster

Ethics and law are different. Or they should be.

Law has the power to coerce. That is a frightening power. There should be as little law as possible. But there should be more ethics than there is.

The boundary between the two domains is not absolute. Clinicians are probably more frightened of being struck off by the General Medical Council (GMC) (after an adjudication on their ethics by the Medical Practitioners’ Tribunal Service) than they are about an order by a civil court that compels their insurers to pay damages for clinical negligence. The exercise of the GMC’s statutory powers can be draconian: the existence of those powers, and the associated sanctions, is certainly coercive.

But although the boundary is sometimes blurred, it is still real. It is the job of the law to keep it from becoming dangerously permeable. In a recent case the law was caught napping.Read More »Ethics Doesn’t Rule, OK?

Cross-Post: Self-experimentation with vaccines

By Jonathan Pugh, Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu.

This is a crosspost from the Journal of Medical Ethics Blog.

This is an output of the UKRI Pandemic Ethics Accelerator project.

 

A group of citizen scientists has launched a non-profit, non-commercial organisation named ‘RaDVaC’, which aims to rapidly develop, produce, and self-administer an intranasally delivered COVID-19 vaccine. As an open source project, a white paper detailing RaDVaC’s vaccine rationale, design, materials, protocols, and testing is freely available online. This information can be used by others to manufacture and self-administer their own vaccines, using commercially available materials and equipment.

Self-experimentation in science is not new; indeed, the initial development of some vaccines depended on self-experimentation. Historically, self-experimentation has led to valuable discoveries. Barry Marshall famously shared the Nobel Prize in 2005 for his work on the role of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, and its role in gastritis –this research involved a self-experiment in 1984 that involved Marshall drinking a prepared mixture containing the bacteria, causing him to develop acute gastritis. This research, which shocked his colleagues at the time, eventually led to a fundamental change in the understanding of gastric ulcers, and they are now routinely treated with antibiotics. Today, self-experimentation is having something of a renaissance in the so-called bio-hacking community. But is self-experimentation to develop and test vaccinations ethical in the present pandemic? In this post we outline two arguments that might be invoked to defend such self-experimentation, and suggest that they are each subject to significant limitations.Read More »Cross-Post: Self-experimentation with vaccines

An Ethical Review of Hotel Quarantine Policies For International Arrivals

Written by:

Jonathan Pugh

Dominic Wilkinson

Julian Savulescu

 

This is an output of the UKRI Pandemic Ethics Accelerator project – it develops an earlier assessment of the English hotel quarantine policy, published by The Conversation)

 

The UK has announced that from 15th Feb, British and Irish nationals and others with residency rights travelling to England from ‘red list’ countries will have to quarantine in a government-sanctioned hotel for 10 days, at a personal cost of £1,750. Accommodation must be booked in advance, and individuals will be required to undergo two tests over the course of the quarantine period.

Failure to comply will carry strict penalties. Failing to quarantine in a designated hotel carries a fine of up to £10,000, and those who lie about visiting a red list country are liable to a 10-year prison sentence.

Read More »An Ethical Review of Hotel Quarantine Policies For International Arrivals