News and blogs

We have published ethics tools to help decision-makers develop a proportionate response to public health threats.

What then does ethical preparedness mean? There is still a great deal of work to do to explore the full scope of such a concept. However, drawing on the lessons from COVID, we suggest the following three elements are likely to play an important role.

We welcome the decision of the World Health Assembly to develop an international agreement on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response under the Constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO).

We welcome the announcement that COVID-19 vaccination will not become a condition of deployment for all healthcare workers in England until the spring.

A new public dialogue exploring the ethical and social considerations of COVID-19 has found that addressing the societal inequalities worsened by the pandemic, building trust and transparency into government policies, and involving the public more in policy making are key areas of public concern and interest.

The UK Pandemic Ethics Accelerator is currently looking to commission research reviews on four topics related to the unequal impacts of the pandemic, self-reported data collection and international aid, and is recruiting a Communications and Public Affairs Manager.

With the UK Government due to announce its Covid winter plan, Danielle Hamm, Director of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, provides a bioethics perspective on recent and expected policy developments relating to covid vaccination.

In relation to pandemic policy in England, the absence of sustained ethical discourse at the level of government has created fundamental challenges to establishing how responsibility should be understood—practically, and as a matter of principle.

In the wake of the announced ending of most COVID restrictions the talk is inevitably of what the new normal will look like. Prominent in these discussions is the idea that there might be an ‘acceptable level of deaths’.

Guest post from Shaun Griffin and Hugh Whittall, UK Pandemic Ethics Accelerator.