9/10/2023 0 Comments Justice ethical principle abortionReligious objections are not the only type of moral objections to certain vaccines. What constitutes an ethical vaccine research and policy has recently been the subject of some controversy involving religious authorities and scholars defending religious freedom, particularly those from the Christian tradition. ‘As quickly as possible’ means as quickly as reasonable ethical and scientific standards allow. However, the urgency of developing vaccines does not mean that research, development, distribution and vaccination policies may bypass ethical and scientific standards ( London and Kimmelman, 2020). The longer we go without adequate vaccine supply, the more people will die of COVID-19 (or other viruses that might appear in the future) or of the consequences of pandemic management measures. It is also important to have different types of vaccines in order to maximize the chances of conferring protection against new variants of the virus and of conferring adequate protection to different population groups. This requires pursuing more lines of research at the same time, given that inevitably many of them will be unsuccessful or would require longer than others to be completed. To prevent or contain such outbreaks today, it is necessary to not only develop safe and effective vaccines but to also do it as quickly as possible and to make them accessible to as many people as possible. By October 2020, COVID-19 has reportedly killed directly over 1 million people all over the world in slightly less than a year ( Musil, 2020). The ‘Black Death’ plague ‘devastated the Western world from 1347 to 1351, killing 25–50% of Europe’s population and causing or accelerating marked political, economic, social and cultural changes’ ( Gottfried, 1983) Around 75 million people perished at the time ( Sandle, 2013). The ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic in 1918 killed at least 50 million people and infected 500 million people worldwide. Indeed, new pandemics are likely to occur again and to be more virulent than this one. The COVID-19 pandemic should not have been an unexpected event, since pandemics or large epidemics periodically occurred throughout human history ( Garrett, 1994). All in all, our argument translates into the rather uncontroversial claim that we should prioritize people’s lives over religious freedom in vaccine research and vaccination roll out. They are unethical because of the risk of causing serious harm to other people for no valid reason irresponsible because they run counter to individual and collective responsibilities to contribute to important public health goals and in the case of certain kinds of religious opposition, they might be irrational because they are internally inconsistent. We argue that religious or personal moral objections to vaccine research are unethical and irresponsible, and in an important sense often irrational. However, moral opposition to COVID-19 vaccine research can be based on other considerations, both secular and religious. The most widely discussed case has been that of certain religious groups that oppose research on COVID-19 vaccines that use cell lines linked to abortions and that object to receiving those vaccine because of their moral opposition to abortion. Although the COVID-19 pandemic is a serious public health and economic emergency, and although effective vaccines are the best weapon we have against it, there are groups and individuals who oppose certain kinds of vaccines because of personal moral or religious reasons.
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