Description
This paper explores some of the injustices potentially generated or exacerbated by the UK government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic as a health security crisis. In late 2020, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced his imposition of a second national lockdown to reduce community transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. He warned that the overrunning of National Health Service hospitals would be “a medical and moral disaster” because doctors and nurses could then be forced to choose which patients to treat, leaving others possibly to die untreated. It appears from this claim that the problem to be avoided, by drastically curtailing social interactions, was the resort to triage at the individual level (such as is practiced in busy military hospitals during wartime). And yet, at the population level, the UK government had already been setting priorities and making decisions that effectively triaged whole sections of British society, to the immediate health benefit of some people and to the likely longer-term detriment of others. Drawing upon ideas about the relationship between infectious diseases, security and ethics, the paper offers an assessment of whether the government was justified in attempting, in the way it did, to maximise the prevention of COVID-19 deaths.
