2021 Volume 31 Issue 1 Pages 4-11
There is an urgent need for bioethicists to inquire upon ethical, legal, and social issues concerning public policies and scientific and technological responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. This article focuses on the public health aspect of such pandemic responses. In particular, it addresses three ethical issues, namely: restrictions on civil liberties, fairness in resource allocation, and individual and collective responsibility for preventive action. These issues are not new and have appeared in the bioethics literature. However, the Covid-19 pandemic has put them in a new light and endowed them with particular importance. This article will describe these issues in detail but will not provide answers to each of them, as they are in need of more discussion than can be given in this short article. We need to examine our pandemic responses from a bioethics perspective and learn as many lessons from it as we can, in order to prepare better for the next pandemic.
Covid-19 pandemic and three problematics in public health ethics.
