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Image by Alexandre C. Fukugava from Pixabay
A special issue of ethic@ highlights views about justice in a pandemic context from Latin American countries. It explores how global injustice deepens in the context of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and differences between the impact of public health measures in high-income versus low- or middle-income countries.
The publication brings together collaborators from GLIDE as guest editors: Florencia Luna (CONICET (National Scientific and Technological Research Council) & FLACSO, Argentina), Romina Rekers (FWF-Institute of Philosophy, University of Graz, Austria), Zeb Jamrozik (Ethox Centre, Pandemic Sciences Institute, University of Oxford, UK) and Rachel Gur-Arie, (Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation, Arizona State University)
The COVID-19 pandemic raises significant ethical challenges, from the allocation of intensive care units to the justification of mandatory vaccination. At the same time, many domestic and global structural inequalities influenced the outcomes of the pandemic from epidemiological, social, and economic perspectives. At the global level, inequalities combined with scarcity and the deepening of nationalism put those particularly in the global south in a precarious situation, especially evident in the case of COVID-19 vaccine access.
In their introduction to this special issue, Luna and Rekers describe the particular impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America and identify the main justice challenges that should be part of the pandemic ethics agenda for the region.
They also draw attention to the knowledge gap that limits the development of evidence-based pandemic preparedness and response strategies in Latin America.
Other articles discuss pandemic public health policy, vaccine distribution, social isolation and structural violence.
This special issue contains articles in Spanish, Portuguese and English, and is edited in the framework of the GLIDE research project Global Health Justice: Duties of International Cooperation for Infectious Disease Control led by Florencia Luna.
The full issue can be accessed via the ethic@ website.