Skip to content

Pandemic Ethics

Pfizer Jab Approved for Children, but First Other People need to be Vaccinated

Dominic Wilkinson, University of Oxford; Jonathan Pugh, University of Oxford, and Julian Savulescu, University of Oxford

Moderna and Pfizer have released data suggesting that their vaccines are well tolerated in adolescents and highly effective in preventing COVID-19. Canada, the US and the EU have already authorised the Pfizer vaccine in children as young as 12. And the UK has just approved the use of the Pfizer vaccine in children aged 12 to 15. But there may a case for holding out on an immediate rollout, for several reasons.

Whether a vaccine is beneficial for someone depends on three things: how likely they are to become seriously ill from the infection, how effective the vaccine is, and the risks of vaccination.Read More »Pfizer Jab Approved for Children, but First Other People need to be Vaccinated

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

Vaccine Nationalism: Striking the balance

Written by Owen Schaefer and Julian Savulescu

This is an updated cross-post of an article published in MediCine

On 2 February 2021, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, issues a broadside against COVID-19 vaccine nationalism, calling it “morally indefensible” and “tantamount to medical malpractice at a global scale.” Rich countries representing 16% of the global population have snapped up 60% of the global supply of COVID-19 vaccines. [1] Meanwhile, India, which has only vaccinated 10% of its population, is facing a catastrophic COVID-19 surge.[2] And the COVAX facility – an international effort to get COVID-19 vaccines equitably distributed around the world – currently only projects capacity to offer vaccines amounting to about 3% of participating countries’ populations by mid-year.[3]

COVID-19 vaccine nationalism is not the exception to normal practice. In almost all matters, countries spend the vast majority of budgets on local needs, and only a small fraction of that foreign aid, even when the latter represents much greater need. But the fact that this is normal or expected does not amount to a moral defense.

Here, we explore a question of practical ethics: what is the appropriate extent to which a country can prioritize its own people over those in other countries in the securing of vaccines for COVID-19?

Read More »Vaccine Nationalism: Striking the balance

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

Suspending The Astra-Zeneca Vaccine and The Ethics of Precaution

By Jonathan Pugh, Dominic Wilkinson, and Julian Savulescu

The authors are working on the UK Pandemic Ethics Accelerator project – @PandemicEthics_. This project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as part of UKRI’s Covid-19 funding.  All authors are affiliated to the University of Oxford.

 

Summary Points

  • Preliminary Reviews suggest that the number of thrombotic events in individuals who have received the Astra Zeneca vaccine is not greater than the number we would normally expect in this population.

 

  • It is crucial that we closely monitor these adverse events. The regulation of new medical interventions always requires us to manage uncertainty.

 

  • A precautionary approach to managing this uncertainty may be important for ensuring continued confidence in vaccination.

 

  • Regulators must weigh the potential risk suggested by these reports of adverse events following vaccination against the harm that suspension of the vaccine could have.
  • The harm of suspending the use of the Astra Zeneca vaccine depends on how many preventable deaths we can expect by suspending its use.

 

  • Amongst other things, this will depend on (i) how many people will be delayed in receiving a vaccine as a result (ii) the mortality risk of the people who would be prevented from receiving a vaccine, (iii) the prevalence of the virus at the time of the suspension, and (iv) the number of people who have received one dose of the Astra Zeneca vaccine, but not a second.

Read More »Suspending The Astra-Zeneca Vaccine and The Ethics of Precaution

What Is The Justification For Keeping Lockdown In Place? Two Questions For The UK Government

Written by Alberto Giubilini and Julian Savulescu

Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford

Given the success of the vaccine roll out in the UK and the higher than expected drop in COVID-19 deaths, it is legitimate to ask whether lockdown should continue to be the key strategy to contain the pandemic or whether the ‘roadmap’ announced by the UK Government should be adjusted. Because lockdown is a very exceptional measure, the burden of proof is on the Government to provide answers as to why the easing of lockdown is proceeding at the current pace and not faster. The impact of lockdown is devastating for the economy, mental health, and employment rates and the cost and benefits are in many cases very unevenly distributed. For instance, the young are at highest risk of redundancy, but benefit less from lockdown because COVID-19 pose a very low risk on them. There is a serious concern around the rise of referrals for mental health assistance for  children and teenager over the past year. If the lockdown is justified at this stage, the Government has the burden of proof of providing a strong justification for this.

Such justification might need to be updated with respect to the one offered when the roadmap was announced on 22 February. That justification was centred on the target of “keeping infections rates under control” as determined by 4 tests: successful vaccine deployment program; vaccines being successful at reducing hospitalizations and deaths in the vaccinated; infection rates not putting unsustainable pressure on the NHS; and the risk assessment not being significantly altered by new variants.

Even assuming those criteria are fair, the justification now needs to take into account the “very very impressive” and “spectacular” results of vaccine rollout, to quote a lead researcher from Public Health Scotland.  As we shall see below, there are reasons to think that the vaccines are producing better results than those expected by the Government and assumed by the modelling used to inform the roadmap. Plausibly also because of the vaccine roll out, the drop in COVID-19 deaths in the UK is now three weeks ahead of the estimates of the modelling that the Government has used to design its roadmap: while the modelling estimated that COVID-19 deaths would fall below 200 a day after mid-March, we reached that point on 25 February. The model suggested we would have as few as 150 deaths per day by 21 March, but we are at that point now.

In light of these data, the Government would need to justify using indiscriminate lockdowns to achieve something – protection of the vulnerable and the NHS – which data suggest is now achievable without overburdening the whole society (as lockdown is doing) and possibly even without burdening those who need protection the most (as selective shielding would do). Vaccines are offering a level of protection to the vulnerable (roughly 80-90% drops in hospitalizations and deaths) that, if it was achieved through measures like selective shielding, would plausibly justify considering selective shielding successful. But vaccines do this without the downsides of indiscriminate lockdown or of selective lockdown.

Read More »What Is The Justification For Keeping Lockdown In Place? Two Questions For The UK Government

Inoculate to Imbibe? On the Pub Landlord Who Requires You to be Vaccinated against Covid

Written by Isra Black and Lisa Forsberg

Elsewhere on the blog Tom Douglas has discussed vaccine requirements for commonplace activities, such as going to the pub, created by the state in the form of law or guidance. Let’s call these vaccine requirements ‘state-originating’. Also on the blog, Julian Savulescu has discussed whether ‘immunity passports’ are a human rights issue. In our view, vaccine requirements or similar raise important issues of human rights in a legal, as well as ethical and rhetorical sense. Legally, since the action of public authorities would be implicated in state-originating vaccine requirements, the measures would be evaluated for their compliance with, among other things, the Human Rights Act 1998 (and therefore the rights protected by the European Convention on Human Rights) and the Equality Act 2010. The legality of state-originating vaccine requirements would depend on issues of principle (eg how should we trade-off interference with personal life and the freedoms to pursue economic and social activities?), scope (what sectors or activities?), and implementation (eg how to handle any exemptions?)

In this post, we take a different angle. We consider the legal human rights and equality dimensions of private-originating vaccine requirements—for example, ‘inoculate to imbibe’: your local pub requiring you to have had a coronavirus vaccine to enjoy a pint.

Read More »Inoculate to Imbibe? On the Pub Landlord Who Requires You to be Vaccinated against Covid

Is it Irrational Not to Have a Plan? Should There Have Been National Guidance on Rationing in the NHS?

By Dominic Wilkinson and Jonathan Pugh.

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

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

Last April, in the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of academics, lawyers, doctors and ethicists wrote publicly about the need for national ethical guidance relating to resource allocation (e.g., see here, here, here). At the time there was concern that there would be insufficient intensive care beds to meet the needs of critically ill patients, and many thought that there needed to be clear guidance to doctors to tell them what to do if that occurred.

While a number of professional groups produced guidelines (for example, the British Medical Association, Royal College of Physicians, Intensive Care Society), no national guidance was ever produced. (A draft guideline was developed but rejected in early April 2020).

Almost 12 months and two pandemic waves later, in a legal ruling last week, Justice Swift refused the application of a number of COVID-affected families who had sought a judicial review on the absence of national guidelines. The ruling is not yet publicly available, but it appears that there were three legal arguments: that there was a statutory obligation to have contingency plans in case demand exceeded capacity, that rationing in the absence of national guidance would violate Article 8 of the Human Rights Act, and that it was “irrational” not to have a national guideline. Swift J apparently rejected all three of these claims.

We will focus here on the third of these – the most ethical of the arguments.

“iii) Rationality – it is irrational not to have a national guideline.”

Read More »Is it Irrational Not to Have a Plan? Should There Have Been National Guidance on Rationing in the NHS?