Responding to COVID-19: How to Navigate a Public Health Emergency Legally and Ethically

Few novel or emerging infectious diseases have posed such vital ethical challenges so quickly and dramatically as the novel coronavirus. An early-view article in the March-April 2020 issue of the Hastings Center Report offers guidance at a time when health care institutions and governments are desperately confronting these challenges. The article addresses these vital questions: When the health system becomes stretched beyond capacity, how can we ethically allocate scarce health goods and services? How can we ensure that marginalized populations can access the care they need? What ethical duties do we owe to vulnerable people separated from their families and communities? How do we ethically and legally balance public health with civil liberties? The lead author is Hastings Center fellow Prof. Lawrence O. Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University and director of the WHO Center on Global Health Law. Read the article for free.

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New Hastings Resource: Supporting Ethical Care and Responding to Moral Distress in a Pandemic

The Hastings Center has a new resource for use within a health care institution’s COVID-19 preparedness and response activities, supplementing public health, clinical practice, and ethical guidance. It aims to help hospital ethics committees and clinical ethics consultation services assess and shift their operations to reflect new tasks and work conditions, including resource scarcity, and respond to challenging ethical needs and concerns among clinicians caring for patients under contingency levels of care and potentially crisis standards of care. Hastings Center research scholar Nancy Berlinger led the team that developed the resource, which is in use in health care institutions and is available on The Hastings Center’s website  for free. The new resource is designed as a complement to The Hastings Center guidance for health care institutions and institutional ethics services responding to COVID-19.

In the Media: Who Gets a Ventilator? The Role of Experts

Hastings Center scholars have been doing interviews with the press and writing articles that address ethical questions raised by COVID-19. In an interview with AP, Nancy Berliner explained why ethics guidelines call for triage teams, rather than bedside doctors and nurses, to make triage decisions. “This is a really terrifying decision—you don’t want any doctor or nurse to be alone with this decision,” she said, adding that having separate teams make decisions is also intended to ensure patients get a fair shot at care regardless of their race, social status, or other factors. Berlinger also discussed triage decisions in Politico and Wired. Writing in the Scientific American blog, Gregory Kaebnick explained why Anthony Fauci is an extraordinary presence during the COVID-19 crisis: “calm yet urgent, informative yet plain-spoken. Along the way, he’s doing something even more difficult than explaining COVID-19. He’s providing insight about the role of the scientific expert in a liberal democracy.” Check out the In the Media: Hastings Responds to COVID-19 page on our website.