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

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?

Cross-Post: Self-experimentation with vaccines

By Jonathan Pugh, Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu.

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

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

 

A group of citizen scientists has launched a non-profit, non-commercial organisation named ‘RaDVaC’, which aims to rapidly develop, produce, and self-administer an intranasally delivered COVID-19 vaccine. As an open source project, a white paper detailing RaDVaC’s vaccine rationale, design, materials, protocols, and testing is freely available online. This information can be used by others to manufacture and self-administer their own vaccines, using commercially available materials and equipment.

Self-experimentation in science is not new; indeed, the initial development of some vaccines depended on self-experimentation. Historically, self-experimentation has led to valuable discoveries. Barry Marshall famously shared the Nobel Prize in 2005 for his work on the role of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori, and its role in gastritis –this research involved a self-experiment in 1984 that involved Marshall drinking a prepared mixture containing the bacteria, causing him to develop acute gastritis. This research, which shocked his colleagues at the time, eventually led to a fundamental change in the understanding of gastric ulcers, and they are now routinely treated with antibiotics. Today, self-experimentation is having something of a renaissance in the so-called bio-hacking community. But is self-experimentation to develop and test vaccinations ethical in the present pandemic? In this post we outline two arguments that might be invoked to defend such self-experimentation, and suggest that they are each subject to significant limitations.Read More »Cross-Post: Self-experimentation with vaccines

An Ethical Review of Hotel Quarantine Policies For International Arrivals

Written by:

Jonathan Pugh

Dominic Wilkinson

Julian Savulescu

 

This is an output of the UKRI Pandemic Ethics Accelerator project – it develops an earlier assessment of the English hotel quarantine policy, published by The Conversation)

 

The UK has announced that from 15th Feb, British and Irish nationals and others with residency rights travelling to England from ‘red list’ countries will have to quarantine in a government-sanctioned hotel for 10 days, at a personal cost of £1,750. Accommodation must be booked in advance, and individuals will be required to undergo two tests over the course of the quarantine period.

Failure to comply will carry strict penalties. Failing to quarantine in a designated hotel carries a fine of up to £10,000, and those who lie about visiting a red list country are liable to a 10-year prison sentence.

Read More »An Ethical Review of Hotel Quarantine Policies For International Arrivals

Announcement: Finalists of the 7th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics and Final Presentation

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ouc prize logo

Please join us in congratulating all of the finalists in the 7th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics.

The 7th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics Final Presentation

 

HT21 Week 8, Wednesday 10th March, 5pm – 6:30 pm.

The Presentation will be held via zoom webinar, the registration details of which are below.Read More »Announcement: Finalists of the 7th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics and Final Presentation

Priority Vaccination for Prison and Homeless Populations

Written by Ben Davies

Last week brought the news that an additional 1.7m people in the UK had been asked to take additional ‘shielding’ measures against COVID-19, following new modelling which considered previously ignored factors such as ethnicity, weight and deprivation. Since many of this group have not yet been vaccinated, they were bumped up the priority list for vaccine access, moving into group 4 of the government’s vaccine plan.

Two other groups, however, have not yet been incorporated into this plan despite appeals from some quarters that they should be. First, new figures reinforced the sense that the virus is disproportionately affecting prisoners, with one in eight of the prison population having had COVID-19, compared with roughly one in twenty in the wider population (in the United States, the prison figure has been estimated to be one in five).

Second, some GP groups and local councils have offered priority vaccination to homeless residents, despite their not officially qualifying for prioritisation on the government’s plan. There have also been calls for the government to incorporate this into national plans, rather than being left to more local decision-making.

Read More »Priority Vaccination for Prison and Homeless Populations

Video Series: How To Prevent Future Pandemics

First interview in the new  Thinking Out Loud series on ‘Animals and Pandemics’: Katrien Devolder in conversation with Jeff Sebo, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU, on how our treatment of animals increases the risk of future pandemics arising, and on what we should do to reduce that risk!

Crosspost: Is It Ethical To Quarantine People In Hotel Rooms?

Written by

Dominic Wilkinson and Jonathan Pugh,

 

The UK government announced that from February 15, British and Irish residents travelling to England from “red list” countries will have to quarantine in a government-sanctioned hotel for ten days, at a personal cost of £1,750. Accommodation must be booked in advance, and people will need to have two COVID tests during the quarantine period.

Failing to quarantine in a designated hotel carries a fine of up to £10,000, and those who lie about visiting a red list country could face a ten-year prison sentence.

Other countries have already implemented mandatory hotel quarantines for travellers, including Australia, New Zealand, China and India. When are such quarantines ethical? And who should pay for them if they are?

Read More »Crosspost: Is It Ethical To Quarantine People In Hotel Rooms?

Cross Post: Not Recommending AstraZeneca Vaccine For The Elderly Risks The Lives Of The Most Vulnerable

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Jonathan Pugh, University of Oxford and Julian Savulescu, University of Oxford

Regulators in Europe are at odds over whether the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine should be given to the elderly. In the UK, the vaccine has been approved for use in adults aged 18 and up, but France, Germany, Sweden and Austria say the vaccine should be prioritised for those under the age of 65. Poland only recommends it for those younger than 60. Italy goes one step further and only recommends it for those 55 and younger.

It is only ethical to approve a vaccine if it is safe and effective. Crucially, the reluctance to approve the AstraZeneca vaccine in the elderly is grounded only in concerns about its efficacy.

The concern is not that there is data showing the vaccine to be ineffective in the elderly, it’s that there is not enough evidence to show that it is effective in this age group. The challenge is in how we manage the degree of uncertainty in the efficacy of the vaccine, given the available evidence.Read More »Cross Post: Not Recommending AstraZeneca Vaccine For The Elderly Risks The Lives Of The Most Vulnerable

Ethics of the GameStop Short Squeeze

By Doug McConnell

Recently a large, loosely coordinated group of individual ‘retail investors’ have been buying up stocks that certain hedge funds had bet against (i.e. ‘shorted’). In doing so, the retail investors have driven up the price of those stocks. This has caused hedge funds that shorted the stock to lose billions of dollars and enabled a number of retail investors to get rich in the process. The phenomenon is anthropologically interesting because it is symbolic of a shift in power away from the traditional Wall Street players towards less wealthy, less well-connected individuals. But what are the ethics of this? Did Average Joe Trader just bring a measure of justice to Wall Street? Or did the mob unethically manipulate the market? If they did, are their actions any more unethical than the usual behaviour of institutional investors?Read More »Ethics of the GameStop Short Squeeze