August 13, 2020

Health Equity, Racism, and this Moment in Time: A Call to Action

More than a century of racist policies affecting every facet of American life, from housing to finance, have led to vast inequities in health and life expectancy between Black and white Americans. Accounting for and mitigating injustice is critical right now, and calls to action were discussed today in an online event, “Health Equity, Racism, and this Moment in Time,” the first in a new series of Hastings Conversations, called “Securing Health in a Troubled Time: Equity, Ethics, and the Common Good.” Hastings Center president Mildred Solomon stated the Center’s commitment to broadening bioethics from its traditional focus on distributional justice—making sure that scarce resources like organs and ventilators are equitably distributed—to include structural injustice, “the ways in which our society is organized to create routine, often invisible, impediments to achieving health and well-being.” Richard Besser, president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, said that his foundation was prioritizing funding to advance health equity, including policies like paid sick leave and family medical leave and unemployment insurance. Herminia Palacio, president of the Guttmacher Institute, said that Guttmacher is addressing reproductive health and rights from a global perspective and described the dramatic ways in which Covid-19 has exacerbated existing inequities. All the panelists agreed that while personal choices matter in health, we must recognize the role of the structures and systems that constrain the choices that individuals have. Watch a video of the event, read the transcript, and learn more about the series.

In the Media: Russia's Rushed Covid Vaccine, Facing Rural Outbreaks, Prioritizing Youth in Coronavirus Care

Russia’s announcement this week that it had registered an unproven coronavirus vaccine raised concerns around the world. In an interview with The Verge, Karen Maschke, a Hastings Center research scholar and editor of Ethics & Human Research, said that Russia’s plan to move ahead before completing clinical trials might pressure other countries, including the U.S., to do the same. “We decided in this country that we’re going to go through a process that takes longer,” she said. “And that’s hard to do sometimes when you have pressure … . I think in the political world, that’s going to be a problem.” Read the article.

Now that Covid is surging in rural areas, they can learn from former hot spots like New York about how to avoid the need to triage care, said Hastings research scholar Nancy Berlinger in an interview with Mother Jones. “The tremendous effort on the part of governors and hospitals to get ventilators and beds into places where they were needed staved off the need for triage, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen,” she said, noting that rural areas have special challenges--“the local hospital might be very small or quite a long way from where the population is.” Read the Mother Jones article.

A New York Times article discussed a Hastings Bioethics Forum post in which Hastings Center fellow Larry Churchill explained why he would forgo care during the pandemic in favor of younger people. “Part of the moral meaning of aging lies in a sense of reciprocity across generations,” he wrote in his post. He elaborated in an interview with the Times in which he said he subscribes to a “life span approach” to ethics, which takes into account that younger people have had less time to experience life’s opportunities and pleasures. Read the New York Times article. Read the Hastings Bioethics Forum post.

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