ABSTRACT
Films are a cultural experience to understand reality. But reality is complex and multidimensional;incomprehensible without the moral dimension of the facts that we have in front of our eyes. Narrative ethics allows us to imagine the moral background of all the processes that accompany health and disease in the individual and in the collective, in the biological and in the social. The film Contagion (Sodelberg, 2011) is a disturbing reflection on the global consequences of an infectious disease in terms of the uncertainty it produces and the fear and lack of control it arouses. More than its predictive value on the COVID-19 pandemic, its greatest success is to exemplify the behavior of pandemics in an interconnected and globalized world. The narration of this film invites us to reflect on how to manage, from a public morality, great health crises. Only the search for the common good can hinder individual freedom, only autonomy understood as relational can weave a fabric of shared responsibilities, only public deliberation can be translated into trust towards institutions. © 2020 Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and Universitat de Girona. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
The development of a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 that can stop the spread of the infection has been postulated as the definitive response to end the COVID-19 pandemic. Far from being free of ethical conflicts, the introduction of a new vaccine in a situation of social, political and economic instability reactivates the tension among institutional power, people's autonomy and the dynamics of global markets. This requires an ethical analysis that includes conflicts in the field of vaccine research and development, glob- al justice in vaccine distribution, prioritization decisions when the supply of vaccines does not meet demand and the positions that should be taken by public institutions to address vaccine hesitancy among people who either do not want to take the vaccine or raise doubts about it. © 2020 Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and Universitat de Girona. All rights reserved.