Health Law and Policy Commons^™

What The Harm Principle Says About Vaccination And Healthcare Rationing, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

Clinical ethicists hold near consensus on the view that healthcare should be provided regardless of patients’ past behaviors. In classic cases, the consensus can be explained by two key rationales—a lack of acute scarcity and the intractability of the facts around those behaviors, which make discrimination on past behavior gratuitous and infeasible to do fairly. Healthcare providers have a duty to help those who can be helped. In contrast, the COVID-19 pandemic suggests the possible recurrence of a very different situation, where a foreseeable acute shortage of healthcare resources means that some cannot be helped. And that shortage is exacerbated …

Worth A Shot: Encouraging Vaccine Uptake Through "Empathy", Jody L. Madeira

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Pro- and anti-vaccine organizations and individuals have frequently invoked empathy as a strategy for increasing uptake of COVID-19 precautions, including vaccinations. On one hand, vaccine supporters deployed empathy to defuse conflict, prioritize safeguarding the collective welfare, and avoid government mandates. On the other hand, vaccine opponents used empathy to emphasize the alleged individual effects of pandemic precautions, mobilize public voices, and stress the importance of medical freedom in policy-making contexts.

This Article first defines empathy and reviews empathy scholarship, paying particular attention to its relationship with narrative and the contexts where empathy can be difficult or dangerous. It then applies …

Allocating Medicine Fairly In An Unfair Pandemic, Govind Persad

Sturm College of Law: Faculty Scholarship

America’s COVID-19 pandemic has both devastated and disparately harmed minority communities. How can the allocation of scarce treatments for COVID-19 and similar public health threats fairly and legally respond to these racial disparities? Some have proposed that members of racial groups who have been especially hard-hit by the pandemic should receive priority for scarce treatments. Others have worried that this prioritization misidentifies racial disparities as reflecting biological differences rather than structural racism, or that it will generate mistrust among groups who have previously been harmed by medical research. Still others complain that such prioritization would be fundamentally unjust. I argue …