Global Health Justice: Duties of international cooperation for infectious disease control
The COVID-19 pandemic illustrates multiple reasons why health, infectious diseases prevention, and pandemic control depend on international cooperation. However, one of the problems during this pandemic has been nationalistic behaviour by many countries. Such behaviour undermines multilateral mechanisms – such as COVAX – to distribute vaccines equitably globally.
One conceptual approach to policy in a range of contexts, including public health, is that of public goods. Some goods, such as vaccines, have features of both private goods (once a vaccine is allocated, others are excluded from its use) and public goods (vaccination creates collective non-excludable benefits via herd immunity). In this project, we will explore if the public goods approach can justify duties to contribute to infectious disease control, via investigating: (i) the transmission of infections between individuals as a uniquely public problem, (ii) infection control as a central public health activity, and (iii) the increasing invocation of public goods in policy discussions of infectious disease control.
This project aims to elaborate conceptual approaches to key global health ethics challenges in the context of infectious diseases. First, it explores the concept of public goods in infectious disease ethics. It evaluates the conceptual and normative implications a public goods approach may have in governments’ nationalistic policies. Second, the project tests the normative implications of a public good approach via an in-depth case study of the COVAX mechanism for the global distribution of vaccines. It will compare this case with other relevant international public health policy responses to infectious diseases. Third, the project aims to develop a thorough set of justifications for a moderate nationalistic approach for allocating duties to contribute to international mechanisms (for example, COVAX) to control infectious disease epidemics and reduce associated harms to global health.
Publication
The project has published a special issue of ethic@ - An International Journal for Moral Philosophy focusing on Global Pandemic Justice. The issue includes articles in Spanish, Portuguese and English.
Project team
- Florencia Luna CONICET (National Scientific and Technological Research Council) & FLACSO, Argentina
- Rachel Gur-Arie Berman Institute of Bioethics, Johns Hopkins University, USA
- Euzebiusz Jamrozik Ethox Centre, University of Oxford, UK
- Romina Rekers FWF-Institute of Philosophy, University of Graz, Austria