Integrating Bioethics into Public Health Practice and Covid-19 Policies

Public health ethics is an established component of the bioethics canon. Leading scholars—from philosophy to law, public health to medicine—have proscribed ethical frameworks to help guide public health decision-making. Despite these robust foundations, public health officials and decision-makers often struggle to integrate bioethical principles into public health practice. Although practitioners generally seek to bring ethical considerations to the fore of public health decision-making, implementation of translational ethics—moving from theory to practice—remains elusive. This is complicated by the fact that, in a pandemic response context, ethical frameworks have to wrestle and integrate with a menagerie of decision-making processes from diverse disciplines. Prof. Parasidis and his research team—which has worked very closely with state/local officials and leadership at one of the country’s largest land grant universities, to create, implement, and assess Covid-19 policies—has witnessed this dilemma throughout the pandemic. This project will examine this problem and recommend best practices for integrating bioethical analysis into public health practice and pandemic response policies.