Top five ethical lessons of COVID-19 that the world must learn
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As the world reflects upon one year since the first cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and prepare for and experience surges in cases, it is important to identify the most crucial ethical issues that might lie ahead so that countries are able to plan accordingly. Some ethical issues are rather obvious to predict, such as the ethical issues surrounding the use of immunity certificates, contact tracing, and the fair allocation of vaccines globally. Yet, the most significant ethical challenge that the world must address in the next year and beyond is to ensure that we learn the ethical lessons of the first year of this pandemic. Learning from our collective experiences thus far constitutes our greatest moral obligation. Appreciating that decision-making in the context of a pandemic is constrained by unprecedented complexity and uncertainty, beginning in June 2020, an international group of 17 experts in bioethics spanning 15 countries (including low-, middle-, and high-income countries) met virtually to identify what we considered to be the most significant ethical challenges and accompanying lessons faced thus far in the COVID-19 pandemic. Once collected, the group met over the course of several virtual meetings to identify challenges and lessons that are analytically distinct in order to identify common ethical themes under which different challenges and lessons could be grouped. The result, described in this paper, is what this expert group consider to be the top five ethical lessons from the initial experience with COVID-19 that must be learned.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.051 | 0.058 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.030 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".