Health And Ethics News

"Uncovering Explicit Discrimination in Pandemic Triage Scenarios"

A study on pandemic triage decisions during COVID-19 reveals that despite ethical guidelines advocating for impartiality, both the public and professionals often prioritize patients based on characteristics such as age, health status, ethical behavior, family roles, and societal contributions, demonstrating explicit discrimination. While there is minimal evidence of covert discrimination through the strategic use of random allocation, the study underscores the complexity of moral reasoning in triage situations and the gap between ethical guidelines and intuitive biases guiding laypeople's decisions in scenarios of medical resource scarcity.