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The Plan That Could Give Us Our Lives Back, by Atlantic staff writers Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal, report on a plan that doesn’t depend on a vaccine, but emphasizes testing, August 14, 2020 |
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Justin Bernstein, PhD, provides A Conversation about Lives and Livelihoods: Evaluating What’s at Stake in Reopening in a one-hour webinar co-sponsored by the Mid-Atlantic Regional Public Health Training Center and the Center for Bioethics & Health Law, August 4, 2020 |
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America Is Giving Up on the Pandemic discusses the risk of a resurgence of COVID-19 in the current contest of both venues reopening and responses to police abuse of power, and points to both the role of luck and the role of injustices in the cases and patterns of infection that will result, The Atlantic, June 7, 2020 |
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Democracy and Pandemics is a series of essays by social scientists investigating “the implications of Covid-19, pandemics, and major crises more generally, for democratic governance” as “public safety concerns are weighed against foundational freedoms and the norms and expectations of a democratic citizenry.” |
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Society after Pandemic, by Alondra Nelson, President of the Social Science Research Council, poses this question for social scientists: “how do the social conditions exposed, exacerbated, and created by the novel coronavirus demand that we substantively rethink our ideas of society and, therefore, some of the prevailing assumptions, methods, and theories of social science?” |
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Mitigating Economic Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Preserving U.S. Strategic Competitiveness in AI, from the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, “offers recommendations for using AI to mitigate the economic impact of COVID-19, and for protecting AI and other emerging technologies as strategic assets and sources of US and allied economic strength.” |
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When to Reopen the Nation is an Ethics Question—Not Only a Scientific One elaborates the normative dimensions of the decision about relaxing shelter at home orders, April 28, 2020 |
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COVID-19 Why We Can’t Test Our Way Out of This describes types of testing available and argues that testing is not the panacea it is purported to be, May 6, 2020 |
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What the Proponents of ‘Natural’ Herd Immunity Don’t Say—a May 1, 2020 New York Times opinion piece arguing that in the absence of a vaccine attempting to achieve herd immunity would involve “catastrophic loss of lives” |
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Grappling with the Ethics of Social Distancing: A Framework for Evaluating Social Distancing Policies and Reopening Plans—Plans for “reopening” society by relaxing, replacing, or eliminating at least some social distancing policies raise difficult ethical questions, as well as theoretical questions about modeling and empirical questions with answers that remain uncertain. This article provides a framework for evaluating various plans, and provides a step-by-step process for their evaluation. It also provides a table displaying key features of different plans |
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When Can We Go Out? Evaluating Policy Paradigms for Responding to the COVID-19 Threat—this white paper from Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics is in the Center’s repository containing all of its pandemic-related white papers and opinion pieces by faculty member Danielle Allen |
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Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience is the product of a bipartisan group of experts in economics, public health, technology, and ethics from across the country gathered by the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics with support from The Rockefeller Foundation |
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The Four Rules of Pandemic Economics—The Atlantic staff writer Derek Thompson discusses four key points and notes that saving the economy or saving lives is a false choice, along with his opinion piece, The Economy Is Ruined: It Didn’t Have to Be This Way, both on April 2, 2020 |
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Disease Control, Civil Liberties, and Mass Testing — Calibrating Restrictions during the Covid-19 Pandemic, by David M. Studdert and Mark A. Hall (from, respectively Stanford’s and Wake Forest’s Schools of Law and Medicine) |
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Restarting America Means People Will Die. So When Do We Do It?—in this April 10, 2020 issue of The New York Times Magazine, five public scholars, including Ezekiel Emanuel and Peter Singer, discuss “reopening” |
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Inequality During a Pandemic, Part I: Shared Suffering and Self-Quarantine, by Robert L. Tsai, author of Practical Equality: Forging Justice in a Divided Nation, writing in the Harvard Law Review Blog, April 9, 2020 |
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In When Will the Pandemic Cure Be Worse Than the Disease? Peter Singer and Michael Plant argue that directly focusing on well-being enables comparison of physical distancing policies and “reopening,” April 6, 2020 |
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In Pandemic Ethics: Infectious Pathogen Control Measures and Moral Philosophy, Jonathan Pugh and Tom Douglas, Senior Research Fellows at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, succinctly discuss utilitarian considerations, “the least restrictive alternative,” and the constraint of proportionality in developing a pluralist justification for interventions, March 16, 2020 |
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Isolated By The Law is the Wake Forest Journal of Law and Policy archive of two webinar series it hosted: one from 2018 on the legal and ethical implications surrounding quarantine during public health emergencies, and the second, a set of 2020 responses to the issues presented in 2018, in light of COVID-19 |
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Building Solidarity: Challenges, Options, and Implications for COVID-19 Responses, a white paper from the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics discussing why social solidarity is a prerequisite for the success of more technical interventions during the pandemic and providing some strategies for fostering solidarity, March 30, 2020 |
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In What Values Should Guide Us? on April 21, 2020 Zeke Emanuel and Danielle Allen discussed values like public health, economic well-being, and respect for civil liberties that must be balanced in maintaining the economy and public health. Allen advocated massively ramped up testing is a key ingredient of re-opening, and panelists noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, which called for testing those with symptoms, were wrong-headed. Instead, asymptomatic people needed to be tested to identify those who are spreading it and ask them to isolate themselves. On December 9, 2020, The New York Times explained different types and methods of testing and their goals; see What You Need to Know about Getting Tested for Coronavirus. |