Covid-19
The Coronavirus pandemic has shaken our lives, reminding us of the fragility of existence, and bringing to the surface pressing ethical issues at individual, collective and international levels. Such issues include clinical ethics decisions regarding scarce healthcare resources allocation, the dilemma of protecting public health vs. suspending individual rights, and the research ethics question of testing vaccines without the usual precautions.
In acknowledgement of the expanding range of COVID-19 ethical issues and the overwhelming amount of information and mis-information spreading online, we at the Health Ethics & Policy Lab have conducted research exploring topics such as digital contact tracing, preventative measures and more.
Peer-reviewed publications
Sleigh, J., Amann, J., Schneider, M., & Vayena, E. (2021). Qualitative analysis of visual risk communication on twitter during the Covid-19 pandemic. BMC public health, 21(1), 1-12. external pageDOI: 10.1186/s12889-021-10851-4
Blasimme, A., & Vayena, E. (2020). What's next for COVID-19 apps? Governance and oversight. Science, 370(6518), 760-762. external pageDOI: 10.1126/science.abd9006
Amann, J., Sleigh, J., & Vayena, E. (2021). Digital contact-tracing during the Covid-19 pandemic: an analysis of newspaper coverage in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Plos one, 16(2), e0246524. external pageDOI: 10.1101/2020.10.22.20216788
Gasser, U., Ienca, M., Scheibner, J., Sleigh, J., & Vayena, E. (2020). Digital tools against COVID-19: taxonomy, ethical challenges, and navigation aid. The Lancet Digital Health. external pageDOI: 10.1016/s2589-7500(20)30137-0
Tools and outputs
Website on Covid19 Ethical Issues
In acknowledgement of the expanding range of COVID-19 ethical issues and the overwhelming amount of information and mis-information spreading online, we at the Health Ethics & Policy Lab have created this platform. With this website, we aim to map existing COVID-19 ethical concerns and provide ETH students, ETH employees, Swiss health care professionals and the general public with useful resources to learn more about multi-faceted ethical issues. This interactive website brings structure to the ethical issues of COVID-19 and allows users to access some reliable and trustworthy sources relevant to us here in Switzerland.
Scientific Events
Prof. Dr. Jacob Stegenga explores the concept of medical nihilism in the context of a pandemic. Medical nihilism holds that our confidence in the effectiveness of medical interventions ought to be low, due to numerous factors, such as the extent of bias and malleability in medical research, or the thin theoretical basis of many interventions. Instead, Prof. Stegenga proposes gentle medicine, which holds that clinical practice should be less aggressive, that the aims and priorities of medical research should be reconfigured, and that regulatory standards should be strengthened. In his talk, Prof. Stegenga articulates these stances and explains what they would say about some of the scientific and policy responses to the Covid pandemic.