Jewish Ethics of Inmate Vaccines Against COVID-19.

PURPOSE: The COVID-19 pandemic broke out at the end of 2019, and throughout 2020 there were intensive international efforts to find a vaccine for the disease, which had already led to the deaths of some five million people. In December 2020, several pharmaceutical companies announced that they had succeeded in producing an effective vaccine, and after approval by the various regulatory bodies, countries started to vaccinate their citizens. With the start of the global campaign to vaccinate the world's population against COVID-19, debates over the prioritization of different sections of the population began around the world, but the prison population has generally been absent from these discussions. APPROACH AND FINDINGS: This article presents the approach of Jewish ethics regarding this issue, that is, that there is a religious and a moral obligation to heal the other and to take care of his or her medical well-being and that this holds true even for a prisoner who has committed a serious crime. Hence, prisoners should be vaccinated according to the same priorities that govern the administration of the vaccine among the general public. ORIGINALITY: The originality of the article is in a comprehensive and comparative reference between general ethics and Jewish ethics on a subject that has not yet received the proper attention.

Priority of Vaccination of the Population against COVID-19: Moral Principles.

The COVID-19 pandemic broke out at the end of 2019 and throughout 2020 there were intensive international efforts to find a vaccine for the disease, which has already led to the deaths of over 6 million people. In December 2020, several pharmaceutical companies announced that they had succeeded in producing an effective vaccine and after approval by the various regulatory bodies, countries started to vaccinate their citizens. With the start of the global campaign to vaccinate the world's population against COVID-19, there was a strong renewal of the debate about prioritizing the population for the vaccination. This article presents the moral approaches to this issue and their consequences.

Ethics of Medical Archival Internet Research Data.

Medical research based on internet archive data, which in some ways is quite different from other data-based studies, is becoming more and more common. Despite its uniqueness and the challenges that characterize it, clear ethical rules designed to guide practitioners in this field have not yet been written. This article points to the lacuna that exists in legal and ethical texts today and offers an ethically balancing alternative. Among other features, the balance is based on the famous three laws of robotics by Asimov and a series of values, including transparency, accountability, fairness, and privacy.

Contracts Capsized by COVID-19: A Legal and Jewish Ethical Analysis.

Countless contracts have been undermined by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 as well as government orders to contain it. Flights have been canceled, concerts have been called off, and dorms have been closed, just to name a few. Do these all count as breaches of contract-or are the parties excused due to the extraordinary circumstances? And how should the losses be allocated between the parties? The law provides one set of answers to these questions; ethics offers another. With a focus on American law (developed over the past two centuries) and Jewish ethics (developed over millennia), this paper shows that the two systems are in accord with some respects and differ in others: Both law and Jewish ethics would excuse a party who cannot complete his contract due to a force beyond his control, like the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet Jewish ethics would require that the excused party still be paid, while American law would not.

Committing to endangerment: medical teams in the age of corona in Jewish ethics.

Doctors have been treating infectious diseases for hundreds of years, but the risk they and other medical professionals are exposed to in an epidemic has always been high. At the front line of the present war against COVID-19, medical teams are endangering their lives as they continue to treat patients suffering from the disease. What is the degree of danger that a medical team must accept in the face of a pandemic? What are the theoretical justifications for these risks? This article offers answers to these questions by citing opinions based on Jewish ethical thought that has been formulated down through the ages. According to Jewish ethics, the obligation to assist and care for patients is based on many commandments found in the Bible and on rulings in the Responsa literature. The ethical challenge is created when treating the sick represents a real existential danger to the caregivers and their families. This consideration is relevant for all dangerous infectious diseases and particularly for the coronavirus that has struck around the world and for which there is as yet no cure. Many rabbis over the years have offered the religious justifications for healing in a general sense and especially in cases of infectious diseases as they have a bearing on professional and communal obligations. They have compared the ethical expectations of doctors to those of soldiers but have not sanctioned taking risks where there is insufficient protection or where there is a danger to the families of the medical professionals.

Justifications for Medical Quarantine in Jewish Ethics.

The current Corona epidemic broke out at the end of 2019 and by early in the year 2020 was spreading all around the world from China to the USA. Among the moves in the fight against the proliferation of the illness, international borders were closed to prevent travel among countries. In the next stage in the fight, many countries imposed quarantines on carriers of the disease as well as on those around them and even on entire civilian populations. Herein, I offer the religious justifications in Judaism for preserving the public's health in general and particularly in the face of disease, especially during of the course of an epidemic. Similarly, I also deal with the religious requirements for preventing the spread of an illness, which come at the expense of fulfilling religious commandments (mitzvot) and suspending them with a view toward preserving life. My conclusion is that ever since the time of the Bible, Judaism has viewed the maintenance of health as having social, religious, and medical importance. Rabbis over the last centuries have justified separating and isolating the sick and extending that isolation to individuals who are in danger of succumbing to the illness. They have found religious justifications for issuing instructions to suspend religious observances in order to prevent the spread of a disease, as is the case in the epidemic that the world is now experiencing with the Corona virus.