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NHS and Care Home Mandates Should Take Account of Natural Immunity to COVID

NHS and Care Home Mandates Should Take Account of Natural Immunity to COVID

by Dominic Wilkinson, Jonathan Pugh, Julian Savulescu

 

Yesterday, the health secretary, Sajid Javid announced that COVID vaccines would become mandatory for frontline NHS staff from April.

Meanwhile, from tomorrow care home workers in the UK will not be able to work if they don’t have a vaccine certificate and are not medically exempt. This vaccine mandate has been controversial, with providers raising concerns that as many 70’000 employees could leave the sector putting beds and care at risk. However, its advocates have argued that it is a proportionate public health measure due to the need to protect vulnerable care home residents.

Proportionality is one key ethical criterion in public health ethics; public health interventions are only permissible if their benefits outweigh their costs. However, another key ethical criterion is necessity; public health interventions are only permissible if they are necessary for achieving a certain benefit.

One striking feature of the current UK care home and NHS staff mandate is that it does not allow an exemption for those who have proof of natural immunity.

Read More »NHS and Care Home Mandates Should Take Account of Natural Immunity to COVID

Cross Post: Should You Stop Wearing A Mask Just Because the Law Gives You Permission To Do So?

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Written by Maximilian Kiener

On December 1 1955, in Alabama, Rosa Parks broke the law. But Parks was no ordinary criminal trying to take advantage of others. She merely refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white person and was arrested for this reason alone. Parks is a hero because she stood up, or rather sat down, for the rights of black people.

Among other things, Parks taught us that we shouldn’t take the law too seriously, since a legal prohibition does not always imply a moral prohibition. In fact, there can be cases where we should actually do what the law forbids.

But we can extend Parks’ lesson and add another scenario where we shouldn’t take the law too seriously. Just as legal prohibitions (such as not to occupy seats reserved for white people) do not always determine what we should do, legal permissions, or rights, cannot determine what we should morally do either.

Consider the UK government, which now permits its citizens to visit public places without wearing masks, despite surging COVID infection rates. Does that permission mean that people in England now have good reasons to abandon their masks?Read More »Cross Post: Should You Stop Wearing A Mask Just Because the Law Gives You Permission To Do So?

Who Cares?

By Stephen Rainey & Yasemin J. Erden

How much of a role should the state play in taking care of us, as opposed to, say, our family members? According to some, care should “start at home” and should, moreover, be selfless. Statements like “Parents and other caregivers look after their children with little thought of return” from a recent New Statesman article sound nice, and elicit nods of approval – of course no returns are sought!

But are they true?Read More »Who Cares?

Paying for the Flu Vaccine

By Ben Davies

As I do every winter, I recently booked an appointment for a flu vaccine. I get it for free in the UK. If I didn’t have asthma, I’d still get vaccinated, but it would cost me between £9 and £14.99. That is both an ethical error on the part of the government, and may be a pragmatic one too.

Read More »Paying for the Flu Vaccine

Hedonism, the Experience Machine, and Virtual Reality

By Roger Crisp

I take hedonism about well-being or welfare to be the view that the only thing that is good for any being is pleasure, and that what makes pleasure good is nothing other than its being pleasant. The standard objections to hedonism of this kind have mostly been of the same form: there are things other than pleasure that are good, and pleasantness isn’t the only property that makes things good.Read More »Hedonism, the Experience Machine, and Virtual Reality

Oxford Uehiro Centre Goes DefaultVeg

By Katrien Devolder

“Britons have cut their meat consumption by 17% over the past decade but will need to double these efforts if they are to meet targets for healthy diets and sustainable food production set out in the national food strategy earlier this year”. So began an article in The Guardian last Friday.[1] The article was reporting the guidance of the National food strategy[2]—commissioned by the UK government, but developed by an independent team in 2021—which recommends that meat consumption is cut by 30% within a decade. Many scientific studies have concluded that we (i.e., richer countries) need to be even more ambitious than that, especially if we want to halt the climate crisis.[3]

Read More »Oxford Uehiro Centre Goes DefaultVeg

Responsibility and Victim-Blaming

Written by Dr Rebecca Brown

The recent sentencing of Wayne Couzens for the murder of Sarah Everard, along with the murder of Sabina Nessa last month, has prompted discussion in the UK of the prevalence of violence against women and the shortcomings of the criminal justice system. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has himself criticised the police for failing to take cases of violence against women sufficiently seriously. In particular, there has been outrage at comments made by some regarding steps women can take to ‘keep themselves safe’.Read More »Responsibility and Victim-Blaming

Ethics of Vaccine Passports

Vaccine Passports as a Human Right

The main way to control the pandemic, as we have all painfully found out, has been to restrict the movement of people. This stops people getting infected and infecting others. It is the justified basis for quarantine of people who have been in high risk areas, lockdown, isolation and vaccine passports.

It is the foundational ethical principle of any liberal society like Australia that the State should only restrict liberty if people represent a threat of harm to others, as John Stuart Mill famously articulated. This harm can take two forms. Firstly, it can be direct harm to other people.

Imagine you are about to board a plane (remember that…) Authorities have reason to believe you are carrying a loaded gun. They are entitled to detain you. But they are obliged to investigate whether you have a gun. And if you are not carrying a gun, they are obliged to free you and allow you to board your plane. To continue to detain you without just cause would be false imprisonment.

Having COVID is like carrying a loaded gun that can accidentally go off at any time. But if vaccines remove the bullets from the gun, they are not a risk to other people and should be free.

Vaccine passports are thus a human rights issue under conditions of lockdown like Melbourne and Sydney are experiencing (the situation is different in Europe where lockdowns have been relaxed), if vaccines reduce transmission to other people sufficiently. Vaccination removes the authority and justification to restrict people’s liberty.

It is not discrimination to continue to restrict the liberty of the unvaccinated – it is just like quarantining those who have entered from high risk countries overseas. Their liberty is restricted because they are a threat to others. Discrimination occurs when people are treated differently on morally irrelevant grounds – differential treatment on the basis of differential threat is morally relevant. For example, to enter some countries, travellers must be vaccinated against Yellow Fever and receive a card as a vaccine passport. No card, no travel.

Are COVID Vaccine Passports a Human Right?

Do COVID vaccines fit into this justification for vaccine passports?

Read More »Ethics of Vaccine Passports

The Morality of Carbon Border Taxes

By Doug McConnell

The European Parliament has adopted a tool called the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) which will apply the EU’s carbon pricing to imported goods. This means that imports from countries with lesser or non-existent carbon pricing will effectively face a tariff. Various governments including Australia and China have objected strongly to the CBAM claiming that it unfairly forces EU rules on other countries, discriminates against them, and represents a return to the bad old days of trade protectionism.

So are CBAMs a noble mechanism to push the world towards carbon neutrality or the latest tool for powerful nations to assert control over weaker nations? I argue that the CBAM does have the potential to be discriminatory and unjust but not against rich countries like Australia that have had ample opportunity to develop (and maintain) a carbon pricing system.

Read More »The Morality of Carbon Border Taxes

The double ethical mistake of vaccinating children against COVID-19

 

Alberto Giubilini

Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics

University of Oxford

 

Against the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI)’s advice that did not recommend COVID-19 vaccination for children, the four Chief Medical Officers in the UK have just recommended that all children aged 12-15 should be vaccinated with the mRNA Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.

This is a double ethical mistake, given our current state of knowledge.

Read More »The double ethical mistake of vaccinating children against COVID-19