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  • Urgency, Delayed Decision-making and Ethics in the Court of Protection

    By Dominic Wilkinson, 24th June 2021 cross post from the Open Justice Court of Protection Project On 11th June 2021,  I was a public observer (via MS Teams) of a case in the Court of Protection: Case No. 1375980T Re GU (also blogged about by Jenny Kitzinger here). The case was (though I did not know it

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  • Cancelling Books

    Written by Neil Levy One of the latest flare ups in the culture wars concerns book publishing. Recent books by Mike Pence, Woody Allen and by Milo Yiannopoulos have all been met with protests, many of them stemming from staff within the publishing houses. Sometimes, these protests have been successful, at least to the extent

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  • Mandatory Vaccination for Care Workers: Pro and Con

    By Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu An edited version of this was published in The  Conversation  The UK government is set to announce that COVID-19 vaccination will become mandatory for staff in older adult care homes. Staff will be given 16 weeks to undergo vaccination; if they do not, they will face redeployment from frontline services

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  • No jab, no job? Vaccination requirements for care home staff

    Written by Lisa Forsberg and Isra Black Last night the Guardian was first to report that staff working in older adult care homes will be required to get vaccinated against Covid-19. According to BBC News, ‘Care staff are expected to be given 16 weeks to have the jab—or face being redeployed away from frontline care

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  • Care home staff vaccination – press release

    Two (contrasting) perspectives on the news this morning about planned mandatory vaccination of care home workers. Professor Julian Savulescu “The proposal to make vaccination mandatory for care home workers is muddle-headed. Vaccination should be mandatory for the residents, not the workers. It is the residents who stand to gain most from being vaccinated.  Young care

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  • ‘Waiver or Understanding? A Dilemma for Autonomists about Informed Consent’

    by Roger Crisp At a recent New St Cross Ethics seminar, Gopal Sreenivasan, Crown University Distinguished Professor in Ethics at Duke University and currently visitor at Corpus Christi College and the Oxford Uehiro Centre, gave a fascinating lecture on whether valid informed consent requires that the consenter have understood the relevant information about what they are

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  • Guest Post: Frances Kamm- Harms, Wrongs, and Meaning in a Pandemic

    Written by F M Kamm This post originally appeared in The Philosophers’ Magazine When the number of people who have died of COVID-19 in the U.S. reached 500,000 special notice was taken of this great tragedy. As a way of helping people appreciate how enormous an event this was, some commentators thought it would help to

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  • 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.

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