The Ethical, Legal and Social Issues of Pandemics (eBook)

This book proposes an ethical and legal framework to improve the responses to social issues related not only to the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, but also to future pandemics. Its contents cover the issues that are likely to be most controversial in any public health crisis. It starts by discussing non-pharmacological measures, such as the appropriateness of confinement, how to control compliance with public health measures and the ethical, legal and social acceptability of health certificates. Then it turns to issues related to the production, distribution and administration of vaccines, with a particular focus on the design and implementation of vaccination policies. Finally, it analyses the most appropriate criteria to develop a triage, when the situation brings us to this terrible scenario.

The analyses presented in this book are based on the ethical and legal frameworks, as well as the social context, of the European Union, and aims to address the main dilemmas faced by any liberal democracy dealing with a pandemic: how to reconcile the defense against a public health crisis together with a respect for fundamental rights and freedoms. The European legal systems have developed a number of conceptual tools designed to ensure that there is no room for arbitrariness in the restrictions introduced by the political power in emergency situations, and this book builds upon these tools.

The Ethical, Legal and Social Issues of Pandemics: An Analysis from the EU Perspective is a predominantly practice-oriented book, which will help policy makers to adopt policies that effectively combine public health needs with individual rights and freedoms. It will also help health care givers to understand better the ethical and legal issues involved in their work and citizens, in general, to participate in public decision making in an informed manner. Finally, it will help to design tools that faithfully comply with existing fundamental rights standards.

Iñigo de Miguel Beriain works as a Distinguished Researcher at the University of the Basque Country and as a Researcher at Ikerbasque, the Basque Foundation for Science. He has been working on ethical, legal and social issues regarding health care and pandemics for more than eight years now. He worked as a senior researcher in the EU funded EDEN project, aimed at ensuring EU societies' resilience against biological crises from 2013 to 2017. He also participated in a COST Action devoted to analyzing the bioethics of disasters. Currently, he is co-leading an H2020 project called PANELFIT, which focuses on data protection issues. He has published several books in Spanish and more than 50 articles and book chapters in English in indexed journals on bioethics, medical law and public health ELSI.