Bidding farewell to 2020: what lessons have we learned and what can bioethics continue to teach us?
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EDITORIAL NOTES
Bidding farewell to 2020: what lessons have we learned and what can bioethics continue to teach us? Graeme T. Laurie 1 Received: 13 October 2020 / Revised: 13 October 2020 / Accepted: 13 October 2020 / Published online: 20 November 2020 # National University of Singapore and Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020
For too many of us, 2020 will go down as the worst year in living memory. As the year comes to an end, the COVID-19 pandemic seems to be entering a second wave in many corners of the globe; apparent successes in getting the virus under control are too few and too early to call; lockdowns—both local and national—are being re-imposed with increasing frequency; and long-standing social injustices such as poverty, discrimination, domestic abuse and inadequate healthcare provision have been more fully exposed and significantly exacerbated in this closing year of the second decade of the millennium. But it is precisely for these reasons that bioethical contributions are required now more than ever before. In the same way that 2020 has taught us that science and politics cannot be divorced from each other, nor can ethics be excluded from the debates about robust and effective social responses to a global threat that reaches into the lives of each and every one of us. Indeed, the importance of recognizing the interconnectedness of both responses and failures in the COVID-19 pandemic to wider social and ethical issues has never been greater. The collective contributions to this December issue of the Asian Bioethics Review demonstrate this all too clearly. The original articles in this volume illustrated the theme of interconnectedness rather well. Than et al. (2020) offer empirical insights to the levels of awareness among medical postgraduate students in Myanmar towards research ethics and research ethics committees (RECs) in delivering scientifically sound, ethically robust research. Their findings provide strong evidence that far more training is required on the centrally important role of RECs and research ethics more generally, and arguably, this call has all the more force in times of emergency when timely and efficient ethics review must work to support expedited scientific responses. The theme of efficiency and effectiveness is continued by Ooi (2020) in the context of overtreatment in the clinical setting, warning of the vagaries of factors that drive a tendency towards overtreatment in modern healthcare systems; once again, lessons here are particularly poignant when already-stretched services are put under further strain by a public health emergency.
* Graeme T. Laurie Graeme.Laurie@ed.ac.uk
1
Edinburgh Law School, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
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Asian Bioethics Review (2020) 12:375–378
The twin objectives to emerge are those of the efficient and just use of scarce resources while ensuring that there is not unjust diversion of resources away from existing needs towards emergency demands on care. Turning to the economic dimensions of healthcare provision, Wong (2020)
