Tag: coronavirus

A COVID-19 Vaccine Won’t Stop the Pandemic

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This post is a part of our Bioethics in the News series

By Parker Crutchfield, PhD

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to maim and kill thousands and devastate countless others, many are pinning their hopes of returning to a life resembling normal upon the development of a vaccine. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has even advised states and cities to be prepared to allocate up to 800 million doses of a vaccine in late October or early November. But it is highly unlikely that a vaccine will do much to stop the pandemic and related significant harm. For a vaccine to get us out of the pandemic, it needs to be developed, distributed, and received. Regardless of its development and distribution, if people don’t take it, then it won’t do any good. And there isn’t much reason to think that many people will take it, at least initially.

Image description: an illustration of a bottle with a white label that says “COVID-19 Vaccine” in black text. The bottle is different shades of blue with a dark blue background. Image source: Shafin Al Asad Protic/Pixabay.

Allocation Models

Recently, a team of scholars advocated for a scheme to allocate the eventual vaccine, the Fair Priority Model. This model, like most models of allocation, assumes that the vaccine will initially be scarce. On this assumption, the allocation then proceeds in phases, the first preventing the most significant harms such as death, the second preventing other serious harms and concomitant economic devastation, and the third addressing community transmission. Other models may set different priorities by, for example, putting health care workers or racial and ethnic minorities first in line.

Developing allocation models is important. But they all rest on a questionable assumption: that the people to whom the vaccine is allocated actually want it, or are at least willing to take it. Scarcity is just as much a matter of demand as it is a matter of supply.

Demand for a Vaccine

Recent evidence suggests that, generally, people won’t take the vaccine initially, even if offered. Almost 80% of people said they wouldn’t get it, if available, at least until others have done so, according to a recent CBS News poll. A return to something resembling normal life requires around 70-80% of the population to be immune.

Mistrust of the politicization of vaccine development or of the scientific practices involved may be responsible for much of the population’s apparent hesitation. But reasonable people may also simply not want to be first in line for a new immunity enhancer. Thus, whatever criteria are used, the allocation scheme must incorporate consideration of demand, not simply supply.

For example, the first allocation according to the Fair Priority Model should go to those people whose being vaccinated would most likely prevent death and who want the vaccine. If the vaccine is allocated to health care workers, the allocation must be to people who are health care workers and who want the vaccine. That is, demand for a vaccine should be just as much a component of allocation models as any other consideration.

Voluntary or Compulsory?

Allocation models must consider the population’s demand for a vaccine in order for such models to provide useful guidance on distribution. Given the apparent lack of demand, giving people the choice of whether to take the vaccine is unlikely to stop the pandemic any time soon. But demand only matters if people have an option. One way to avoid having to consider the population’s willingness to take the vaccine, and to dramatically decrease the time it takes to boost 70-80% of the population’s immunity, is to take that willingness out of the equation and make it compulsory.

Already some vaccinations are compulsory, depending on a person’s circumstances. Some have argued that the COVID-19 vaccine should be mandatory. One common principle in philosophy is that ought implies can. This means that what one’s moral obligations are hinges on what one can do. Even if one can justify compulsory COVID-19 vaccination, it’s unlikely that this is something that can be achieved. Compulsory vaccination is not something we can do, which means it’s not something we should do.

Consider, for example, the widespread reluctance to wear a mask and the flouting of social distancing guidelines. Wearing masks and social distancing are very minor burdens to bear for others’ well-being. While it is true that mask and social distancing mandates push against unrestrained permission to do what you want when you want to do it, others be damned, these intrusions are arguably minor (though are admittedly disruptive). Requiring 70-80% of the population to go someplace and get poked by a needle on multiple occasions or sprayed in the nose are much greater liberty intrusions. It is a pipe dream to think that a vaccine mandate would be accepted by the very same population who refuses to bear the more minor burdens of mask wearing and social distancing, which amounts to at least 29% of the population, enough to undermine our ability to stop the pandemic.

Different Baskets for Our Eggs

If administration of the COVID-19 vaccine is voluntary, not enough people will volunteer to get it. If administration is mandatory, still not enough people will get it. The vaccine’s allocation can only be either voluntary or mandatory. Either way, not enough people will get it, at least at first. The only conclusion to draw is that a vaccine is not going to stop the pandemic, at least any time soon. If ought implies can, we ought not pin our hopes upon a vaccine, because we cannot hope for it to work to stop the pandemic. There is no light at the end of the tunnel.

Image description: a narrow tunnel between two brick walls that leads to darkness. Image source: Peter H/Pixabay.

However, incentives and disincentives can change a person’s mind. Other than the incentive intrinsic to getting the vaccine—the preservation of human life and well-being—are there others that might make people more willing to get it, such as money or tax breaks? Or are there disincentives to vaccine refusal that might convince someone it is better to get it than it is to refuse? Carrots or sticks?

If neither, then we’re in for the long haul.

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Parker Crutchfield, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Program in Medical Ethics, Humanities, and Law at the Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine, where he teaches medical ethics and provides ethics consultation. His research interests in bioethics include the epistemology of bioethics and the ethics of enhancement, gene editing, and research.

Join the discussion! Your comments and responses to this commentary are welcomed. The author will respond to all comments made by Thursday, October 8, 2020. With your participation, we hope to create discussions rich with insights from diverse perspectives.

You must provide your name and email address to leave a comment. Your email address will not be made public.

More Bioethics in the News from Dr. Crutchfield: Trust and Transparency in Quarantine; Public Health Crisis Warrants Liberty Restrictions; We Should Tolerate and Regulate Clinical Use of Human Germline Editing

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“There’s no proof that anything works!” The ethics of COVID-19 research

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This post is a part of our Bioethics in the News seriesBioethics in the News purple and teal icon

By Robyn Bluhm, PhD

The New York Times Magazine recently published a long-form story about the tension between treating patients with COVID-19 by any means that might improve their chances of survival and recovery, and enrolling them in clinical trials to establish the safety and efficacy of these treatments, thus improving care both for future patients and for those who survived the trial. As with many stories about health care in the current pandemic, this article both raises perennial issues in bioethics and shows them in their starkest form: the seriousness of the condition of these patients and the lack of knowledge about how best to help them mean that the ethical dilemma described in the story is particularly clear. But a closer look at work in bioethics and the epistemology of clinical research suggests that, while the dilemma is clear, there are more ways forward than the two incompatible ways portrayed in the story.

The story begins by describing the clash between a critical-care physician faced with a COVID-19 patient whose condition was worsening, and a researcher who had enrolled that patient in a clinical trial. The former wanted to give the patient a higher-than-standard dose of the anticoagulant she was being treated with, even though this might mean that she would need to be withdrawn from the trial. The latter advocated for the importance of maintaining the integrity of the study, saying that acting on instinct instead of on evidence “was essentially ‘witchcraft’.”

Unsurprisingly, this characterization did not go over well with the other doctors in the meeting. A less contentious way of describing the situation might have been to say that, while doctors use their clinical judgment to make decisions about how best to use available evidence in caring for a particular patient, this only works when there is evidence available. And everyone agrees that, in the case of COVID-19, there is horrifyingly little evidence. This means that enrolling COVID-19 patients in clinical trials is not depriving them of standard care (care that such patients would ordinarily receive if not in the trial)–standard care for this condition does not yet exist.

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Image description: An illustration of a health care worker wearing blue scrubs, head covering, and face covering. Surrounding them are a stethoscope, face mask, syringe and surgical tools, thermometer, and microscope. The background is light pink. Image source: sunshine-91/Vecteezy.

There is a lot to think about here. Importantly, it’s not the case that the doctors treating seriously ill patients had no idea what to do. They had a wealth of experience treating patients with severe viral infections, with acute respiratory distress syndrome, with cardiac arrest, or with pathological immune reactions (the “cytokine storm” sometimes seen in chemotherapy patients). Some of this knowledge informed the care of early COVID-19 patients, raising the question of which treatments could be successfully generalized to this new patient group.

The notion of generalizable knowledge is in fact central to research ethics. The Belmont Report, which guides research ethics oversight in the United States, draws a bright line between research and clinical practice on the basis of their ostensibly distinct goals. Research aims to provide generalizable knowledge, while clinical practice aims to benefit an individual patient. This way of drawing the distinction meant that when physicians depart from standardly-accepted care in the treatment of an individual patient, it does not count as research (and therefore does not require ethics review). It also leads to the problem described above: enrolling a patient in a research study requires that they forgo their right to individualized care and are treated according to study protocol. Deviations from the protocol, such as the one described in the opening of the New York Times story, are prohibited. Patients whose care does not follow the protocol will usually be withdrawn from the study.

But this sharp distinction between research and practice also makes assumptions about the kind of clinical research being conducted. Schwartz and Lellouch (1967) distinguish between “explanatory” and “pragmatic” approaches to clinical trials. Explanatory trials are designed to minimize the influence of any factors, other than the experimental therapy, that could affect the outcome being measured. These other factors include additional medications and the presence of comorbid disease. Pragmatic trials, by context, are designed to resemble actual clinical practice, where patients often take more than one medication and often have more than one health problem. Pragmatic trials may also enroll a wider variety of participants (especially older participants), permit alterations in the study protocol, be more flexible in the timing of outcome measurement; in general, they are more flexible in their design and analysis. A given trial will fall somewhere on the spectrum between “highly explanatory” and “highly pragmatic” in its design.

In the case of COVID-19, there are good reasons to favor trials that are more pragmatic. First, there are so many factors that might affect prognosis (or were previously thought to do so) – age, gender, weight, blood type, various pre-existing conditions – that the study population cannot be narrowly defined. If it is, then the results of the study will apply only to people in that narrow population. Second, care for critically ill patients is rapidly developing. Even in the absence of an established drug regimen, survival rates have been improving. This means that by the time a trial is completed, the experimental therapy will be implemented in a very different context of care. Perhaps more importantly, because of these first two reasons, a strict, explanatory trial is less likely to give generalizable knowledge than a more pragmatic one (Bluhm and Borgerson, 2018). Research that reflects clinical practice is more likely to be useful in improving clinical practice.

Robyn Bluhm photoRobyn Bluhm, PhD, is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Philosophy and Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University. She is a co-editor of The Bloomsbury Companion to Philosophy of Psychiatry.

Join the discussion! Your comments and responses to this commentary are welcomed. The author will respond to all comments made by Thursday, September 3, 2020. With your participation, we hope to create discussions rich with insights from diverse perspectives.

You must provide your name and email address to leave a comment. Your email address will not be made public.

More Bioethics in the News from Dr. Bluhm: Philosophy, Mental Illness, and Mass Shootings; “Ask your doctor” – or just check Instagram?; Antibiotics: No Clear Course; To Floss or Not to Floss? That’s not the question

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COVID-19 Vaccine: “Not throwing away my shot”

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Bioethics in the News logoThis post is a part of our Bioethics in the News series

By Sabrina Ford, PhD

In the advent of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, there is an underlying belief in the United States that a COVID-19 vaccine may be the Holy Grail, the silver bullet to assuage the pandemic and open up the quarantine doors. Yet, there is a divide in the United States regarding vaccination acceptance. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports less than 50% of adults receive the vaccine for influenza (flu). In the 2017-2018 flu season, 37.1% received the vaccine, the lowest rate in ten years. The rate increased to 45.3% in 2018-2019. In a recent study reported in The Boston Globe, authors Trujillo and Motta found that 23% of persons surveyed said they would not get the COVID-19 vaccination. The study breaks it down further regarding anti-vaccination attitudes (also known as “anti-vaxxers”) and found that 16% of respondents identified themselves as anti-vaxxers, and of those, 44% said they would not get the COVID-19 vaccine. The researchers contend that anti-vaccine sentiment still exists in spite of the deadliness of COVID-19.

Vaccine debate

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Image description: An illustration of a light green circle with a vaccination syringe in the center that is surrounded by green viruses. Image source: Alexandra_Koch/Pixabay.

As Americans, we want what we want how we want it. For some of us, the vaccine cannot come fast enough, and it better be effective. Others don’t plan to get it even when it is available. I have set up a dichotomous choice, but indulge with me in thinking through the debate. Many philosophical and ethical discussions occur in academic research—and particularly in mainstream and social media—highlighting opposing views of those who choose to vaccinate and those who do not. Often, these two positions fall along partisan lines, but not in the way that we might expect. The anti-vaccine movement began with the political left, but spread to the religious right, conservatives, and libertarians.

Approximately 20 years ago, a flawed but influential study linked the Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism. It started a hot debate fueled by staunch supporters of anti-vaccination from both sides of the aisle. The anti-vaxxer movement took hold with powerful liberal voices, but in recent years has become convenient for the religious and far-right who aim to keep government out of personal decisons. A 2015 Pew Research Center Study found that 12% of liberals and 10% of conservatives are opposed to vaccination. Herein lies my question: to what can we attribute the strong stance that anti-vaxxers take regardless of political position? Why does this question matter? America is a free country. However, the movement warrants an understanding in the midst of a pandemic of an extremely deadly disease whereby science tells us that a vaccine may mitigate infections and death.

Facts are stubborn things

One commonality between the liberal and conservative anti-vaccine stance is a lack of trust in science and medicine, and belief in “alternative facts.” This is particularly true within the anti-vaxxer movement. Some don’t trust science based on real life experiences or notable past deceptions in public health interventions, such as the Tuskegee Experiments, Havasupai Diabetes Project, Henrietta Lacks, etc. Antithetically, the autism study was deceptive by negating the lifesaving MMR vaccine as harmful. This myth has persisted over time, fueled by the anti-vaxxer movement and the discount of science as faulty, dangerous, driven by big government, and against individual choice. Facts versus feelings further complicates the human cognitive decision-making process. For example, in the case of vulnerable children with autism for whom science has not fully unraveled a cause or treatment, anti-vaxxers feel they can place blame on the MMR vaccination. Feelings contribute to the uptake of faulty information and fake news via social media, in turn drowning out the facts.

Herd immunity

Vaccines have been one of the greatest public health successes in the world due in large part to herd immunity. Herd immunity comes with centuries of science resulting in the reduction of deadly diseases. The cursory explanation for herd immunity is: if a large proportion of a community is vaccinated, the lower the collective risk to the community. The algorithm suggests at least 80-90% of a community needs to have immunity to a disease and/or be vaccinated to protect the proportion of persons with compromised health conditions who cannot be vaccinated. The range in vaccination rates is dependent on the effectiveness of the vaccine. We have seen the eradication of smallpox and polio because of a highly effective vaccine delivered to most of the children in the U.S. This was achieved through mass immunization and extremely effective public health messaging. Most recently, buy-in to herd immunity has devolved from a fear of deadly disease to a fear of the very thing that prevents deadly disease. As a result, we have seen a resurgence in measles, which can be deadly for children with compromised immune systems. The science of herd immunity is powerful but relies on collectivism and social responsibility. The requirement that a large proportion of a community needs to be vaccinated to protect others cuts across American values of individuality and freedom of choice.

Final thoughts

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Image description: Fabric face masks of various colors and patterns are arranged flat on a yellow surface. Image source: antefixus21/Flickr Creative Commons.

Before COVID-19, we lived in a different era with some generations never experiencing or witnessing extremely contagious, deadly diseases, confirming a belief that we can individually control our own disease states. Now, we are faced with a history making, highly infectious, deadly disease. Will we adopt a philosophy of sacrificing a bit of comfort by quarantining, wearing masks, or experiencing the pinch of a vaccination to save the lives of others? The jury is still out on that debate. We have witnessed segments of our society rebel and even retaliate against the idea of vaccination. Yet, scientists are working faster than ever to develop an effective COVID-19 vaccine, and the U.S. government has promised to enable the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to relax clinical testing protocols to push the vaccine out in order to save lives. No, the vaccine will not be the silver bullet, but it has the potential to augment natural immunity to work as a tool of collective protection. Is the deadliness of COVID-19 enough to override the need for anti-vaxxers to hold onto personal choice?

This is not an indictment on one’s personal choice not to be vaccinated, but an opportunity to ponder individuality versus social responsibility for the greater community benefit. COVID-19 has been a game changer on human behaviors, requiring us to social distance and wear masks for the greater good. Will we embrace social responsibility and be vaccinated to save lives? How do we reconcile our individualism with the adoption of collectivism?

ford-sabrina-2020Sabrina Ford, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology and the Institute for Health Policy in the Michigan State University College of Human Medicine. Dr. Ford is also adjunct faculty with the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences.

Join the discussion! Your comments and responses to this commentary are welcomed. The author will respond to all comments made by Monday, June 1, 2020. With your participation, we hope to create discussions rich with insights from diverse perspectives.

You must provide your name and email address to leave a comment. Your email address will not be made public.

More Bioethics in the News from Dr. Ford: Contemplating Fentanyl’s Double Duty

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A Reasonable and Virtuous Response to a Pandemic

Bioethics in the News logoThis post is a part of our Bioethics in the News series

By Larissa Fluegel, MD, MHS

Within five days of the first two registered cases here in Michigan, social media traffic about COVID-19 visibly ramped up, with a significant amount of COVID-19-related posts on my news feeds. This was the same for my friends. People were posting photos of entire local store aisles almost empty. I went to the store and to my astonishment, checkout lanes had long lines of individuals with carts filled with toilet paper, water, and hand sanitizer. Every single cart looked the same. I thought, what is happening? The apocalypse? Where have the virtues of altruism and selflessness gone? Anyway, this blog is not about toilet paper or human responses to fear, but about the question of what is safe, appropriate, and virtuous to do at the individual level, all things considered.

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Image description: Empty shelves that normally contain toilet paper in a Walgreens store, shared on March 13, 2020. Image source: Raed Mansour/Flickr Creative Commons.

What we know.

  • This is a new virus. The fact that it is new means that humans lack the immunity to mount a quick and sufficiently strong response to clear the virus before it causes disease.
  • Based on all 72,314 cases in the Chinese population, most (80.9%) are ‘mild’ respiratory flu-like (but also gastrointestinal); 4.7% turn critical and 2% are fatal.
  • Severity and risk of death increase with age and with pre-existing conditions.
  • There is a two to fourteen-day incubation time (this is the period of time from when the virus first enters one’s body and the time one shows symptoms).
  • Mild soap and water used as recommended are highly effective in eliminating the virus.
  • There is no effective treatment or vaccine against the virus yet.
  • Michigan’s Governor declared a state of emergency on March 10 and mandated all Michiganders to stay home as of March 23. This state of emergency declaration is not intended to cause panic, but instead is to allow the State to quickly deploy resources to support local responses in combatting the spread. This also is done to avoid overwhelming the healthcare system, where patients are being treated in hospital hallways, cared for by exhausted healthcare workers who might be pressed to decide which patients warrant oxygen assistance and which die.

Why do we want to stop the spread?

What we really hope to achieve is to flatten the curve of the spread. The goal is to decrease the rate of infection so that too many people don’t get sick at the same time, going beyond our current health care system’s capacity to safely and effectively treat. By doing so, we protect our fellow citizens. How? By preserving access to necessary medical resources.

What do these things mean to us?

We should understand that eventually we might all get sick. We must not make decisions based on fear. We instead should make decisions based on what we know about the virus and its spread, i.e., the facts and recommendations from reputable health authorities like the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) who are carefully monitoring and studying the situation, while avoiding unsupported advice appearing on social media. This is ethical, responsible, and virtuous behavior.

When public health officials strongly recommend that we stay home, we follow their recommendations to the best of our ability because this helps save lives. Remember the issue is no longer about us individually but about us as a community and a nation:

“…[T]o prevent the state’s health care system from being overwhelmed, to allow time for the production of critical test kits, ventilators, and personal protective equipment, and to avoid needless deaths, it is reasonable and necessary to direct residents to remain at home or in their place of residence to the maximum extent feasible.” -The Office of Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Executive Order 2020-21 (COVID-19)

When public health officials strongly recommend that we immediately practice appropriate social distancing, we do that. What this means is that whenever we are able to do so, we should anticipate and avoid places where we cannot be at least 6 feet from another person—except, of course, family members who we live with. If you work in an industry that requires you to show up, do not fret. If the rest of us altruistically do what we can, you should also be okay. If you have a friend or relative who may be at increased risk because of a prior condition, stay away from them—again, let us take care of each other.

But be mindful that social distancing does not mean social isolation. We can and should stay connected through technology that enables us to reach out and connect. This is also good for our emotional and mental health.

Of course, we must not forget to practice respiratory and hand washing etiquette, washing our hands the right way, with soap and running water, when:

  1. You arrive at your location (if leaving home is necessary) and when you return home.
  2. Before and after handling food.
  3. After toileting.

None of these cautions and behavioral virtues suggest that it is necessary to freak out and purchase all the available toilet paper or hand sanitizer. All indications are that food and basic necessities will continue to be available. It does not mean to be obsessively and compulsively spraying disinfectant on every surface of your home multiple times a day, every day. If we practice social distancing or stay home where mandated and practice appropriate hand washing and respiratory etiquette, this is not necessary.

Times like this call for bolstering virtuous behavior. Do what we are told for the sake of all. Do what we can to reconnect with our families and our local community. Do remember those in need. We can go out for a walk or a run or a hike. With appropriate distance these are all okay.

The bottom line is that it is appropriate and virtuous to calmly and sensibly take measures to slow the spread, following guidelines from valid sources while taking care of each other… keeping our distance but keeping in touch.

fluegel-larissa-blogLarissa Fluegel, MD, MHS, is an Adjunct Assistant Professor with the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences and the College of Human Medicine at Michigan State University where she teaches bioethics and the social context of clinical decisions. Her academic interests include the integration of bioethics, social determinants of health, shared decision-making, and health policy into medical education.

Join the discussion! Your comments and responses to this commentary are welcomed. The author will respond to all comments made by Thursday, April 9, 2020. With your participation, we hope to create discussions rich with insights from diverse perspectives.

You must provide your name and email address to leave a comment. Your email address will not be made public.

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Trust and Transparency in Quarantine

Bioethics in the News logoThis post is a part of our Bioethics in the News series

By Parker Crutchfield, PhD

As of February 11, more than 1,000 people have died from the novel coronavirus, the vast majority of them in China. As the virus spreads, China has been implementing the largest quarantine in human history. The virus has spread beyond the borders of China, and has been observed in at least twenty-four countries. There is no way of knowing how effective the quarantine has been. It obviously didn’t prevent the virus’s spread, though it’s likely fewer people are infected because of it. Part of the reason that the quarantine has not worked to prevent the spread is that many in China evidently don’t trust those implementing the quarantine. About five million people left Wuhan before the quarantine locked down the city. And the images in this video are certainly not of a family trusting their government.

Trust and quarantine
A prominent account of what makes public health interventions permissible implies that public trust is necessary for public health interventions to be morally permissible. As a general rule, this is false. Public trust in Flint has been totally undermined. But in that city, public health interventions on the water supply are not only permissible, they are obligatory. So, it’s not true that trust is necessary. But that is not to say that public trust isn’t critical to the value of a public health intervention.

Trust and mistrust street signs image
Image description: two green street signs with white lettering, one reads “trust” with an arrow pointing to the right, the other reads “mistrust” with an arrow pointing to the left. Image source: Pixabay.

The value of a public health intervention, and its moral authority, is primarily a matter of the value of the benefit it achieves (the value of the cases prevented) minus the disvalue of the burdens it requires people to bear (the disvalue of social isolation). Trust may not be necessary, but it certainly impacts the benefits and burdens of a public health intervention. There is significant benefit in not having five million people evade a quarantine because they mistrust those implementing it. Who is more burdened, the family who fights tooth and nail the officials forcibly removing them from their home, or the family who goes willingly because they trust them? Mistrust creates burdens; trust promotes value. In other words, mistrust encourages people to break quarantine. If the goal is to encourage social isolation and compliance, public trust is key.

Trust and transparency
If trust is so important to the effectiveness of a quarantine, what factors promote trust? That same theory of the morality of public health interventions derives the value of transparency from the claim that transparency promotes trust. The idea is that the more open policy decisions, the more the public will trust them. As before, this is not generally true. Some research indicates that transparency actually undermines trust (De Fine Licht, 2011; Grimmelikhuijsen, 2014).

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Image description: A screen display on the side of a building showing “early discovery, early report, early quarantine, early diagnosis, early treatment” during the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak in Hefei, Anhui, China. Image source: Zhou Guanhuai/Wikimedia Commons.

That is, the more people know about policy implementation the less they trust the people implementing it. If accurate, this research suggests instead that if we want people to trust public health policies, information should be withheld from them. This is in line with earlier research that suggests what people really want is for decision-makers to be empathetic and non-self-interested and that, if they are, for them to make mostly non-transparent decisions. People may want “stealth democracy” (Hibbing and Theiss-More, 2002).

So, probably it is not generally true that transparency promotes trust. But quarantine might be a special case. When the public already mistrusts those implementing public health policies, it’s not clear that there is any way to rebuild trust other than by being transparent. China was already in a tough spot, after their mishandling of the SARS outbreak in 2003, about which officials withheld information from the public and the global health community. Combined with the attempted silencing of the coronavirus whistleblower and his recent death, officials’ actions set the stage for a mistrustful public and less effective quarantine.

The next outbreak
Given officials’ actions in response to SARS, the public response to attempts to control coronavirus was probably never going to be trusting. Regardless of when the next outbreak occurred, the public was never going to trust the interventions to control it, whatever they happened to be. That was determined in 2003. Transparency now won’t help trust now, and so it won’t help the effectiveness of the present quarantine or any of the other interventions, such as the disinfectant now being sprayed. The damage to the present is done. Sadly, given that officials have responded like they did in 2003, interventions aimed at controlling their next outbreak, whenever that happens to be, will be upon a mistrusting public. When that time comes, if officials choose to quarantine, it seems likely that that quarantine will elicit similar responses: people will evade and resist, grabbing door frames as they are pulled from their homes. The virus will not be contained as well as it could have been, and more people will get sick and die. Present transparency could have promoted future trust, greater compliance, and prevented sickness and death, but that opportunity has come and gone.

There is a lesson for local officials as they try to intervene on the ongoing water crisis in Flint, the PFAS scare in West Michigan, and, in my hometown, the threat of mosquito-borne illness. The lesson is: transparency now purchases trust later. And that trust may prevent suffering and save lives.

parker-crutchfield-cropParker Crutchfield, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Program in Medical Ethics, Humanities, and Law at the Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School of Medicine, where he teaches medical ethics and provides ethics consultation. His research interests in bioethics include the epistemology of bioethics and the ethics of enhancement, gene editing, and research.

Join the discussion! Your comments and responses to this commentary are welcomed. The author will respond to all comments made by Thursday, March 5, 2020. With your participation, we hope to create discussions rich with insights from diverse perspectives.

You must provide your name and email address to leave a comment. Your email address will not be made public.

More Bioethics in the News from Dr. Crutchfield: Public Health Crisis Warrants Liberty Restrictions; We Should Tolerate and Regulate Clinical Use of Human Germline Editing

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