The NY Times has an article about the ethics of the vaccine pause. I think TLS Guy mentioned this in a prior post, but the gist of it is that the precautionary principle seems to trump most other considerations in the EU way of thinking.
>>>European health agencies this week faced, with millions of lives in the balance, a staggeringly high-stakes incarnation of what ethicists call the trolley problem.
Imagine standing at a railway switch. If you do nothing, a trolley barreling down the track will hit three people in its path. If you pull the lever, the trolley will divert to an alternate track with one person. Which option is morally preferable: deliberately killing one person or passively allowing three to die?
In Europe’s version, German regulators identified seven cases of a rare cerebral blood clot, three of them fatal, out of 1.6 million who had received the AstraZeneca vaccine. Regulators had no proof they were linked, only a statistical anomaly. Still, continuing vaccinations might make them responsible for putting a handful of people in harm’s way — like pulling the lever on the trolley tracks. . . .
“This idea of the precautionary principle plays a big role in E.U. policy,” said Govind Persad, a University of Denver bioethicist. That
principle calls for pausing any policy that might bring unforeseen harms in order to study those harms before proceeding. Imposing blind risk, however small, on unknowing citizens would be wrong. <<<
Ethicists are worried about the gamble Germany took to halt AstraZeneca doses over seven cases of blood clots. It will not be the last time hard decisions are made in this pandemic.
www.nytimes.com
