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Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has placed an enormous burden on health systems, and guidelines have been developed to help healthcare practitioners when resource shortage imposes the choice on who to treat. However, little is known on the public perception of these guidelines and the underlying moral principles. Here, we assess on a sample of 1033 American citizens’ moral views and agreement with proposed guidelines. We find substantial heterogeneity in citizens’ moral principles, often not in line with the guidelines recommendations. As the guidelines are likely to directly affect a considerable number of citizens, our results call for policy interventions to inform people on the ethical rationale behind physicians or triage committees decisions to avoid resentment and feelings of unfairness.
- ethics
- behavioural research
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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Footnotes
Contributors All authors contributed equally to this article.
Funding FF and SQ acknowledge the support of the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR COVID-19 Fast-track Grant 14715638- E.HAG).
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Ethics approval The project received ethics approval by the LISER Research Ethics Committee with official communication on 5 May by its Chair, Professor Axel Gosseries (UCL).
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data availability statement Data are available upon request.
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