July 9, 2020

Black Lives in a Pandemic: Implications of Systemic Injustice for End-of-Life Care

The entire current issue of the Hastings Center Report examines the ways in which the pandemic has highlighted connections between health and social structures—concerning not just access to health care but also conditions of living that affect health, from inequality to political and environmental conditions. Several essays look specifically at how racial inequality is embodied in health inequities. “Black Lives in a Pandemic: Implications of Systemic Injustice for End-of-Life Care” argues that racial health and health care disparities ought to carry far more weight in clinical ethics than they do. In particular, the essay examines palliative and end-of-life care for African Americans, highlighting the ways in which American medicine, like American society, has breached trust. Read the essay for free.

Does Our Focus on Genomics Distract Us from Addressing Inequality?

A new Hastings Center special report takes a critical look at the role of genomics in perpetuating racism and inequality. The key messages of For ‘‘All of Us’’? On the Weight of Genomic Knowledge are that genomic information is crowding out ways of reducing inequality, has thwarted medicine from advancing justice, and is creating new forms of social classification and surveillance. The special report was produced under The Hastings Center’s Initiative in Bioethics and the Humanities, supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and private donors. Co-editors are Erik Parens, a senior research scholar and director of the initiative, and Joel Michael Reynolds, the initiative’s inaugural Rice Family Postdoctoral Fellow in Bioethics and the Humanities. Hastings Center research scholar Carolyn P. Neuhaus is a contributor. Read the special report for free.

In the Media: Where Should Covid Vaccines Be Tested? Hastings Scholar on Ethical Pitfalls

More than 140 possible covid vaccines are being tested, and the U.S. aims to have a vaccine by January. But despite the urgency of getting a vaccine to market quickly, we must avoid ethical problems, like testing in low-income countries but selling in rich ones. In an interview in Wired, Hastings research scholar Karen J. Maschke said, “There are long-standing research ethics questions around conducting research in resource-limited countries.” Maschke, who is the editor of Ethics & Human Research, a Hastings Center journal, has written about how the race for a Covid-19 vaccine may undermine standards for both ethics and evidence. Read the Wired article. And read “Ethics and Evidence in the Search for a Vaccine and Treatments for Covid-19” in Hastings Bioethics Forum, co-authored by Maschke and Michael K. Gusmano.

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