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Vaccine Rationing and the Urgency of Social Justice in the Covid‐19 Response
Author(s) -
Schmidt Harald
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
hastings center report
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.515
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1552-146X
pISSN - 0093-0334
DOI - 10.1002/hast.1113
Subject(s) - rationing , health care rationing , disadvantaged , covid-19 , pandemic , distributive justice , economic justice , economics , business , law and economics , public relations , public economics , political science , medicine , economic growth , microeconomics , health care , disease , pathology , infectious disease (medical specialty)
Abstract The Covid‐19 pandemic needs to be considered from two perspectives simultaneously. First, there are questions about which policies are most effective and fair in the here and now, as the pandemic unfolds. These polices concern, for example, who should receive priority in being tested, how to implement contact tracing, or how to decide who should get ventilators or vaccines when not all can. Second, it is imperative to anticipate the medium‐ and longer‐term consequences that these policies have. The case of vaccine rationing is particularly instructive. Ethical, epidemiological, and economic reasons demand that rationing approaches give priority to groups who have been structurally and historically disadvantaged, even if this means that overall life years gained may be lower .