Ethics - Bill of Health

Call for Abstracts: Looking Forward to a Post-Pandemic Landscape

July 13, 2020July 13, 2020 Carmel Shachar Leave a comment

By Carmel Shachar and Katie Kraschel

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted virtually every facet of day-to-day life.

This disruption has forced us to examine baseline choices and assumptions about how to deliver health care, participate in public discourse, provide access to education, and support the workforce. This “great revision” will continue in several iterative stages: an immediate response to the crisis, a modulation as the pandemic continues, and a resolution into a “new normal.”

The Petrie-Flom Center and the Solomon Center for Health Law Policy are interested in tracking when crisis settles into the new normal and articulating how public policy and law should respond to that evolution.

an ambulance parked at the entrance of an emergency department

Racial Disparities Persist in Human Subjects Research

June 24, 2020June 23, 2020 Beatrice Brown Leave a comment

By Beatrice Brown

Human subjects research has long been plagued by racial inequality. While flagrant abuses have been curtailed, disparities have, unfortunately, persisted.

One area ripe for scrutiny is clinical trial enrollment. A 2018 study by William Feldman, Spencer Hey, and Aaron Kesselheim in Health Affairs documents racial disparities in trials that are exempt from typical requirements for informed consent from study participants.

Madison, Wisconsin / USA - April 24th, 2020: Nurses at Reopen Wisconsin Protesting against the protesters protesting safer at home order rally holding signs telling people to go home.

Safer at Home? Yes, but Not According to the Wisconsin Supreme Court

June 3, 2020June 3, 2020 Beatrice Brown Leave a comment

By Beatrice Brown, Jane Cooper, and Danielle Pacia

Due to the Bill of Health production schedule, this piece is being published two weeks after it was written, on May 20^th, 2020. The authors would like to affirm the importance of protests against anti-Black racism in America.

Stay-at-home orders—the primary means of managing the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S.—face increasing opposition as protestors against these public health measures clamor for a “return to normal.” In Wisconsin, pushback against stay-at-home orders culminated in the state Supreme Court’s decision on May 13 to reverse the state’s “Safer at Home” policy.

Republican leaders of the state legislature filed suit against state Department of Health Services Secretary-designee Andrea Palm and other health officials, resulting in the case Wisconsin Legislature v. Palm. In a 4-3 ruling, the Wisconsin Supreme Court held that the “Safer at Home” order was “unlawful” and “unenforceable.” Read More

Are Clinicians Without PPE Morally Obligated to Care for COVID-19 Patients?

April 15, 2020April 17, 2020 Beatrice Brown Leave a comment

By Beatrice Brown

There is currently a dire shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) at hospitals across the United States, especially in areas that have been hit the hardest by COVID-19.

PPE is essential to protecting those on the front lines of the pandemic – the President of the American Medical Association (AMA) has said that without adequate PPE, we may face a shortage of clinicians to treat COVID-19 patients, in addition to other shortages of critical resources.

Without adequate PPE, are clinicians morally obligated to provide care to patients who are either presumed positive for COVID-19 or who definitely have the virus?

Here, I argue that to treat patients without adequate PPE is supererogatory but not obligatory. In other words, this is a noble and praiseworthy act, but clinicians should not be obligated to perform these heroic acts, nor should we blame them, morally, for their decision to refuse to provide care.

Crowd of small symbolic 3d figures linked by lines

Why ‘Mandatory Privacy-Preserving Digital Contact Tracing’ is the Ethical Measure Against COVID-19

April 14, 2020April 14, 2020 Cansu Canca Leave a comment

Cross-posted from Medium, where it originally appeared on April 10, 2020.

By Cansu Canca

Thanks to privacy-by-design technology, population-wide mandatory use of digital contact tracing apps (DCT) can be both more efficient and more respectful of privacy than conventional manual contact tracing, and considerably less intrusive than current lockdowns. Even if counterintuitive, mandatory private-by-design DCT is therefore the only ethical option for fighting COVID-19.

Click here to read the full post on Medium.

(image via higyou / Shutterstock.com)

Photograph of a doctor in blue scrubs overlaid with an illustration of a padlock

Anonymity in the Time of a Pandemic: Privacy vs. Transparency

March 30, 2020March 30, 2020 Cansu Canca Leave a comment

By Cansu Canca

As coronavirus cases increase worldwide, institutions keep their communities informed with frequent updates—but only up to a point. They share minimal information such as number of cases, but omit the names of individuals and identifying information.

Many institutions are legally obligated to protect individual privacy, but is this prohibition of transparency ethically justified?

Some even go a step further and ask you, an individual in a community, to choose privacy over transparency as well. Harvard—alongside with Yale, Chicago, and Northwestern—requests you to “Please Respect Individuals’ Privacy. Anonymity for these individuals remains paramount. Please respect their privacy—even if you believe you know who they are—so they can focus completely on their health” (emphasis in original).

But do you have an ethical obligation to do so at the time of a pandemic?

Call for Submissions: Journal of Law and Biosciences, “Law and Ethics in the Time of a Global Pandemic”

March 26, 2020March 26, 2020 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

The Journal of Law and the Biosciences (JLB) is soliciting essays, commentaries, or short articles for a special issue on “Law and Ethics in the Time of a Global Pandemic.” For this issue we especially encourage shorter pieces, of roughly 1500 to 5000 words. If any particular aspect of how this pandemic will affect some part of the law—from lease terms to courtroom procedures to constitutional questions about mandatory testing—intrigues you, write it up and send it in.

Close up of a mosquito sucking blood on human skin. This mosquito is a carrier of Malaria, Encephalitis, Dengue and Zika virus.

Malaria Eradication: For Africa as America

March 7, 2019August 5, 2019 James Toomey Leave a comment

There is a page in the history books waiting to be written for the eradication of malaria. In recent years, malaria has killed more people globally than war—it’s killed predominately children, and predominately in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite being curable, and eliminated from most developed countries, malaria is the fifth deadliest infectious disease in the world.

A team of scientists in Italy is looking to write that history. Read More

Update on the Future Direction of Patient Safety in the National Health Service

February 15, 2019February 15, 2019 John Tingle Leave a comment

Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care on February 6 gave a wide-ranging speech on the future direction of patient safety in the NHS. The speech is important as it gives key insights into government priorities for patient safety policy development in the NHS.He stated that we all trust nurses and doctors more than any other profession. He spoke about the importance of a “just culture” in the NHS and openness, honesty, and trustworthiness. Read More

graphic of connections going through a city

‘Big Data, Health Law, and Bioethics’ Examines the Intersection of Major Issues in Health Care

September 5, 2018September 7, 2018 The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

When data from all aspects of our lives can be relevant to our health – from our habits at the grocery store and our Google searches to our FitBit data and our medical records – can we really differentiate between big data and health big data? Will health big data be used for good, such as to improve drug safety, or ill, as in insurance discrimination? Will it disrupt health care (and the health care system) as we know it? Will it be possible to protect our health privacy? What barriers will there be to collecting and utilizing health big data? What role should law play, and what ethical concerns may arise? A new timely, groundbreaking volume explores these questions and more from a variety of perspectives, examining how law promotes or discourages the use of big data in the health care sphere, and also what we can learn from other sectors.

Tag: Ethics