The aim is for you to address ethical issues that pandemics pose. The obvious place to start from is immediate experience and local news during the 2020-1 COVID pandemic, but there have been many pandemics over the course of human history.
There are growing sources of academic discusison of pandemic ethics, and you should draw on them. See the Pandemic Ethics section of the Useful Links in Medical Ethics page. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1q4oS3a8Sw1ghtJl1G9tvTQ5jOUqAmo7xNbyyWtmV8sE/mobilebasic
Your goal is to find issues in medical ethics, but they can also be linked to wider issues. To clarify, it is not really a issue in medical ethics whether you should attend an indoor party without a mask, whether someone visiting a store should wear a mask, whether stores can ban people without masks, or whether there should be state fines for people who don’t wear masks. We are mostly concerned with ethical issues facing health care professionals. What is their responsibility to their patients, patients’ families, their own families and themselves? Who should get treatment first? Who should pay for treatment? Should patients be moved to residential or nursing homes if those places have high rates of COVID infection?
But there are public policy issues that fit well in medical ethics. For example, can the state or employers require people to get a vaccination when a vaccine becomes available?
There are also media ethics and political issues. Should health professionals be involved in protests against government policy, on social media or in front of the media? Should health professionals speculate publically about over reporting or under reporting of the numbers of COVID cases? What are the responsibilities of health professionals when politicians advocate for prevention approaches or treatments that conflict with the generally accepted medical evidence? Should they condemn the politicians or try to stay apolitical?
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