Learning Lessons from COVID-19 Requires Recognizing Moral Failures
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SYMPOSIUM: COVID-19
Learning Lessons from COVID-19 Requires Recognizing Moral Failures Maxwell J. Smith & Ross E. G. Upshur
Received: 11 June 2020 / Accepted: 3 August 2020 # Journal of Bioethical Inquiry Pty Ltd. 2020
Abstract The most powerful lesson learned from the 2013-2016 outbreak of Ebola in West Africa was that we do not learn our lessons. A common sentiment at the time was that Ebola served as a “wake-up call”—an alarm which signalled that an outbreak of that magnitude should never have occurred and that we are illprepared globally to prevent and respond to them when they do. Pledges were made that we must learn from the outbreak before we were faced with another. Nearly five years later the world is in the grips of a pandemic of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). It is therefore of no surprise that we are now yet again hearing that the COVID-19 pandemic serves as the “wake-up call” we need and that there are many lessons to be learned to better prepare us for future outbreaks. Will anything be different this time around? We argue that nothing will fundamentally change unless we truly understand and appreciate the nature of the lessons we should learn from these outbreaks. Our past failures must be understood as moral failures that offer moral lessons. Unless we appreciate that we have a
M. J. Smith School of Health Studies, Western University, Arthur & Sonia Labatt Health Sciences Building, 1151 Richmond Street, London, Ontario N6A 5B9, Canada e-mail: [email protected] R. E. G. Upshur (*) Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto, 155 College Street, Toronto, Ontario M5T 3M7, Canada e-mail: [email protected]
defect in our collective moral attitude toward remediating the conditions that precipitate the emergence of outbreaks, we will never truly learn. Keywords COVID-19 . Pandemics . Public health ethics . Ebola
The most powerful lesson learned from the 2013-2016 outbreak of Ebola in West Africa was that we do not learn our lessons (Smith and Upshur 2015a). A common sentiment at the time, shared by Bill Gates (2015) among many others, was that Ebola served as a “wake-up call”—an alarm which signalled that an outbreak of that magnitude should never have occurred and that we are ill-prepared globally to prevent and respond to them when they do. Pledges were made that we must learn from the outbreak before we were faced with another (Chan 2015). Nearly five years later the world is in the grips of a pandemic of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Did we heed the urgent wakeup call that Ebola provided? For the most part, we did not, and this should not be surprising. In a paper published in 2015, we illustrated that, starting with the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronavirus and including outbreaks of H5N1 and H1N1 influenza viruses, the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-coV), and Ebola, we colle
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