Chapitre 5. L'impact de la pandémie de COVID-19 sur l'évolution du paradigme éthique de la médecine clinique en Russie (« à la guerre comme à la guerre ¼).

The CОVID-19 pandemic became a catalyst for the transformation of the ideas of the existence of global ethics in favor of real moral pluralism, exposed the problem of abandoning the principles of personalized medicine in favor of public health ethics (collective ethics of civil society). The authors sequentially analyze the objective factors that influenced the change in the moral paradigm of the clinical medicine in Russia: the peculiarities of the course of infection, the lack of resources in the health-care sector, the inability to use advanced treatment methods in different groups of patients, the protection of medical workers, the provision of emergency and planned surgical interventions, and the prevention of further spread of infection. In addition, the moral consequences of the use of administrative measures to limit the spread of the pandemic are given: restriction of social contacts, the use of personal protective equipment, retraining of specialists, re-profiling of the bed fund, leveling problems of communication with colleagues, patients and students. Special attention is paid to the problem of “anti-vaxxers”, representing a significant part of society and hindering the implementation of the vaccination program of the population. We believe that active and passive protest against vaccinations lie not in a rational plane, but in an emotional one, in an immanent distrust of the state and its institutions. Thus arises a secondary ethical problem of the state’s responsibility for the life and health of every citizen, regardless of their beliefs. Contradictions in the moral principles of individual strata of the population (including groups like those who agree to get vaccinated, those who doubt, the indifferent ones, “active anti-vaccinators”) currently seem irreconcilable due to the state’s detachment from solving moral problems.Ethic divergence in the context of the pandemic has become real, stable and difficult to overcome, while the claims of a single, global, global bioethics are being questioned. The COVID-19 pandemic has formulated the ethical task of the 21st century, which will have to be the development of public policy and practice of clinical medicine in the context of serious moral contradictions and significant bioethical differences.

Adapting the ethical review process for COVID-19 research: reviewers’ perspectives from Pakistan

Background:Research ethics committees (RECs) globally have adapted their responses to provide timely reviews of research proposals in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The REC of the National Bioethics Committee (NBC) of Pakistan has followed suit.Aims:To explore perceptions of NBC-REC reviewers who reviewed COVID-19 research proposals while describing the newly instituted Rapid Turnaround Review (RTR) system.Methods:This cross-sectional study used 3 methods of data collection: a demographic questionnaire filled in by permanent members and co-opted reviewers; qualitative in-depth interviews conducted with both groups; and document review related to COVID-19 research proposals.Results:Eight permanent members and 3 co-opted members participated. Under the RTR system, the time for review was established as 72 hours after receipt of the proposal. The Committee reviewed 55 projects over 10 months. Participants described numerous strengths of the new system, including introduction of online discussions via Zoom as well as presence of co-opted members leading to learning opportunities, particularly for junior members. The RTR system also allowed NBC-REC to gain recognition it had not enjoyed previously. Challenges identified by respondents included initial difficulty in initiating the system and tighter deadlines that may have compromised review quality. Poor scientific quality of proposals, compounded by external pressures to provide rapid approval, added to reviewers’ frustrations. While fruitful, the RTR system was considered unsustainable beyond a public health emergency.Conclusion:Adaptation of ethical review processes is essential in emergencies; however, existing guidelines have to be modified to suit contextual needs.

How to derive ethically appropriate recommendations for action? A methodology for applied ethics.

Researchers in applied ethics, and some areas of bioethics particularly, aim to develop concrete and appropriate recommendations for action in morally relevant real-world situations. When proceeding from more abstract levels of ethical reasoning to such concrete recommendations, however, even with regard to the very same normative principle or norm, it seems possible to develop divergent or even contradictory recommendations for action regarding a certain situation. This may give the impression that such recommendations would be arbitrary and, hence, not well justified. Against this background, we, first, aim at showing that ethical recommendations for action, although being contingent in some sense, are not arbitrary if developed appropriately. For this purpose, we examine two types of contingencies arising in applied ethics reasoning based on recent examples of recommendations for action in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, we refer to a three-step model of ethical reasoning towards recommendations for actions. This, however, leaves open the question of how applied ethics may cope with contingent recommendations for action. Therefore, in a second step, we analyze the role of bridge principles for developing ethically appropriate recommendations for action, i.e., principles which connect normative claims with relevant empirical information to justify certain recommendations for action in a given morally relevant situation. Finally, we discuss some implications for reasoning and reporting in empirically informed ethics.

Cascading failures in COVID-19 vaccine equity.

Ethical analysis should encompass upstream decisions and their downstream consequences.

Why the World Needs Bioethics Communication.

This essay argues for the importance of formalizing public engagement efforts around bioethics as something we might call "bioethics communication," and it outlines the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics' plans for engaging in this effort. Because science is complex and difficult to explain to nonexperts, the field of science communication has arisen to meet this need. The field involves both a practice and a subject of empirical research. Like science, bioethics is also complex and difficult to explain, which is why the world needs bioethics communication. The authors are engaged in a brand-new effort to establish the sort of public bioethics efforts that would constitute bioethics communication, through a program which they call the Dracopoulos-Bloomberg iDeas Lab. The authors invite colleagues to experiment and learn with them as they invest in the development of bioethics communicators and their products.

Running Toward Disasters: One Bioethicist's Experience in Translational Ethics.

Translational ethics is a practice that aims to apply bioethics insights and process to the real-world contexts of clinical medicine, but also government policy, systems issues, and public health. This work has been a career focus for a relatively small number of bioethicists over the years, but it has drawn greater attention due to the pandemic and a greater realization of the impact of health inequities and systemic injustice. This essay discusses the pathway, rewards, and challenges of translational bioethics as experienced by one bioethicist working with state and national groups on a range of translational ethics issues, often related to public health disasters. There is much remaining work to be done, and the goal of the essay is to encourage rising bioethicists to engage in translational bioethics.

Othering and Health Justice.

Bioethics needs to expand its vision. We must examine and interrogate the social and structural barriers that help traditionally privileged communities maintain minoritized groups as inherently inferior "others." Justice requires the field to look beyond the walls of hospitals, clinics, and medical academia to address and ameliorate the structural injustices that give rise to health disparities long before differential access to health services becomes an issue for underserved patients. Doing so means engaging in challenging multidisciplinary collaborations in order to understand the sociohistorical complexities of health and illness, appreciate the factors that contribute to shaming and blaming those "others" who are not "us," and work to lessen the discomfort with uncertainty that impedes equity. All of this necessary work takes bioethics well beyond the well-trodden pathways of our usual scholarship and practice. But we simply have to reach higher to do health justice.

A Tale of Two Bioethics.

Phase 1 drug trials-first-in-human tests of new pharmaceuticals- are necessary for FDA approval, and healthy volunteers are necessary to conduct those trials. Bioethicists are rightly concerned with the morally problematic aspects of these trials: Are risks and benefits balanced? Are would-be volunteers sufficiently informed, and have they given proper consent? But these are not the only, or even the most worrisome, ethical problems with Phase 1 research. In Adverse Events (2020), Jill Fisher looks beyond these ordinary bioethical concerns to the moral complications associated with the motivations of healthy volunteers and the demands of the everyday work of running those trials. Her work is the latest example of a much needed "second bioethics." Unlike the "first bioethics," this approach views health-care institutions from the outside, examining the structural and organizational sources that generate the ethical quandaries bioethicists are called upon to mediate and the ethical problems they often fail to see. Adverse Events makes clear that the moral problems of medicine can only be addressed by supporting bioethics of both types-the first and the second.

The Lifeboat at World's End: Moving Beyond Crisis Standards of Care.

It may be too late to avoid the climate crisis, likely to be humanity's most expensive, widespread, and enduring catastrophe. This is a qualitatively different kind of catastrophe, in which increased costs, decreased revenue, and no possibility of bailout force communities to harshly cut budgets, especially in health care. Little is known about making such brutal cuts fair or efficient, nor how to help the public accept them. The crisis presents an opportunity for bioethicists to play a crucial role, but one for which traditional approaches are inherently inadequate. Although often dismissed as heartless, Garrett Hardin's "lifeboat ethics" started a conversation about making ethical choices in global disasters-where all options are painful and unacceptable-and may provide guidance. Bioethics during the climate crisis must focus on communities rather than individuals and help survivors grieve the terrible consequences. Because today's choices will affect many generations, with the burdens falling most heavily on poor communities, we have to construct a radical bioethics to help tomorrow's health care become green, efficient, and fair.

The Twin Crises of Principles and Stories.

This symposium contribution argues that politicized responses to the COVID-19 pandemic mark the fracturing of the consensus that bioethics has been built upon. This consensus involved the mutual dependence of principles and stories: principles need stories to become applicable in clinical action, and stories need to reflect principles if they are to make generalized claims. Two mid-20th-century theorists, Erving Goffman and Walter Benjamin, each predicted the thinness of appeals to principles and to stories, respectively; their skepticism describes our moment. Anti-public health responses to COVID restrictions show that principles now have radically different meanings within different factional groups, so appealing to them perpetuates divisions. Complementary to that, stories are told more as displays of group membership than as testimony of individual experience. The predictable future is that bioethics controversies will become more fraught.

Narrative Ethics, COVID-19, and Flawed Stories.

The bioethics literature has paid little attention to resistance to COVID-19 vaccination, despite the safety and effectiveness of vaccines and the heavy death toll of the virus. A narrative approach to the problem might begin with descriptions of good and bad narratives about vaccination. Bad stories about vaccination tend to be constructed backwards, starting with the desired conclusion (vaccination is dangerous or ineffective) and from that filling in needed "facts" to support the conclusion. Physicians need to act in more trustworthy ways in order to convince at least some patients to consider vaccination.

Against Authority: The Bioethics of Ivermectin Use for COVID-19 Infection.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic has brought new ethical challenges to both health care professionals and the general public. Among the ethical problems amplified during this period were the making of medical decisions to quickly introduce some drugs into therapeutic practice with unproven or insufficiently proven effects (such as ivermectin), the validity of drug testing, and the allocation of limited resources. FIELDS OF UNCERTAINTY: The COVID-19 pandemic brought to the attention of the entire scientific world a new problem, which exceeded the guidelines and rules known until then. Out of the desire to quickly solve this medical problem, a series of measures were taken, however not sufficiently validated in scientific terms; the recommendations regarding the use of drugs known for their properties to treat a greater number of conditions, such as ivermectin, was tried. DATA SOURCES: A narrative review of the specialized literature was carried out using keywords such as COVID-19, ivermectin, ethics, and off-label medication from Scopus and Google Scholar but also of official documents developed at the international level (World Health Organization). ETHICS AND THERAPEUTIC ADVANCES: The off-label use of ivermectin alone or in combination with other medications during COVID pandemic raised problems related to the demonstration of its effectiveness, but also to ethics, starting from the expectations that both the medical staff and the population had of it. Ivermectin therapy was also evaluated by analyzing the behavior of ivermectin based on ethical principles (nonmaleficence, beneficence, and respect for one's autonomy) or on justice. Even in times of pandemic, exceptionalism must not triumph, and finding an effective treatment must be done through studies that respect ethical standard. CONCLUSIONS: The failures or rather lack of success in decision making during the pandemic showed that alongside scientific knowledge and the development of health policies, it is necessary to constantly evaluate the measures and decisions from an ethical point of view, and the prevention of slippages and abuses is not only necessary but even mandatory.

Into the "New Normal": The Ethical and Analytical Challenge Facing Public Health Post-COVID-19.

Even though various countries' overall policy for dealing with the pandemic was not particularly innovative, the pandemic was perceived as a unique crisis. "COVID exceptionalism" has seemed to create "a new normal" that we all need to "learn to live with". The main change in perspective, while not new for public health experts, is that health exists within a social and political context. While public health ethics has turned out to be an important discipline, there is a long way to its wider acceptance. Entering the "new normal" calls for a wider embrace of public health approaches to ethics. The renewed emphasis on understanding health as a social concept encompasses central normative implications in relation to dealing with COVID-19 and in relation to dealing with other global crises, chiefly climate change. We argue that entering the era of "the new normal" in healthcare requires a nuanced understanding of the relationship between the individual and society and demands the formulation of a new system of bioethics focused on the concept of solidarity as a central value in public health. Such a concept should refer to the fact that in the "new normal", risks require new social and political formations of standing together in confronting risks that cross national, cultural, and identity borders. Forming and expanding solidarity in health and healthcare, we argue, is the main normative challenge for public health today.

Vulnerabilities highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic from a bioethics perspective / Vulnerabilidades evidenciadas pela pandemia de covid-19 na perspectiva da bioética / Aumento de las vulnerabilidades en la pandemia del covid-19 desde la perspectiva de la bioética

Resumo Por meio de revisão integrativa da literatura, este artigo teve o objetivo de identificar vulnerabilidades da população brasileira evidenciadas durante a pandemia da covid-19. Realizou-se busca nas bases de dados SciELO, LILACS e PubMed no período de fevereiro a março de 2021, sendo selecionados sete artigos, que foram organizados conforme as informações a seguir: título, autor, abordagem dos estudos, objetivos e principais resultados. Foram encontradas as seguintes vulnerabilidades: negação de direitos, falta de poder socioeconômico e violência contra crianças e idosos. Estas foram sistematizadas nas categorias "vulnerabilidade por falta de poder" e "vulnerabilidade por momentos do desenvolvimento humano". Constatou-se que essas fragilidades são historicamente marcadas na população brasileira e têm sido acentuadas neste período de pandemia, o que ressalta a necessidade de intervenção ativa na perspectiva da bioética.

Abstract This integrative literature review sought to identify the vulnerabilities faced by the Brazil population and which were highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Bibliographic search conducted on the SciELO, LILACS and PubMed databases from February to March 2021 identified seven articles, which were organized by title, author(s), methodology, objectives, and main findings. The analysis found the following vulnerabilities: denial of rights, lack of socioeconomic power, and violence against children and the aged. These were systemized into the categories "vulnerability by lack of power" and "vulnerability by human development cycle." Such vulnerabilities are historically marked in Brazil and have increased during the pandemic, thus highlighting the need for a bioethics-based active intervention.

Resumen Desde una revisión integradora de la literatura, este artículo tuvo como objetivo identificar el aumento de las vulnerabilidades de la población brasileña durante la pandemia del covid-19. Se realizó una búsqueda en las bases de datos SciELO, LILACS y PubMed, entre febrero y marzo de 2021, que dio como resultado siete artículos, que fueron organizados por: título, autor, enfoque del estudio, objetivos y principales resultados. Se encontraron las siguientes vulnerabilidades: Negación de derechos, falta de poder socioeconómico y violencia contra niños y adultos mayores. Estos datos se sistematizaron en las categorías de "vulnerabilidad por falta de poder" y "vulnerabilidad por momentos del desarrollo humano". Se constató que estas debilidades ya estaban históricamente marcadas en la población brasileña y se acentuaron aún más en este período de la pandemia, lo que muestra la necesidad de una intervención activa desde la perspectiva de la bioética.

Radicalizing moral conservatism in herd immunity during COVID-19.

The concept of herd immunity during the coronavirus disease 2019 is constantly changing. The World Health Organization's current focus is on vaccination. With ties to the bioethics of autonomy and exemptions to mandatory vaccinations, the problem is that moral conservatism tends not to cooperate in the rollouts. Radical means can be applied not just to the concept but also its application, emphasizing the need to depart from conservative hindrances to public health.

Protecting Practitioners in Stressed Systems: Translational Bioethics and the COVID-19 Pandemic.

COVID-19 revealed health-care systems in crisis. Intersecting crises of stress, overwork, and poor working conditions have led to workforce strain, under-staffing, and high rates of job turnover. Bioethics researchers have responded to these conditions by investigating the ethical challenges of pandemic response for individuals, institutions, and health systems. This essay draws on pandemic findings to explore how empirical bioethics can inform post-pandemic translational bioethics. Borrowing from the concept of translational science in medicine, this essay proposes that translational bioethics should communicate knowledge about ethical challenges in health-care work to support health systems change. The authors draw from their experience with the Study to Examine Physicians' Pandemic Stress (STEPPS), an interdisciplinary research project that investigates physicians' experiences at the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using STEPPS as an example of empirical bioethics with potential for translation, the authors review their research and discuss the ongoing process for translating their findings, focusing on how bioethics research and practice can contribute to supporting the health-care workforce.