Article Text
Abstract
Would compulsory treatment or vaccination for COVID-19 be justified? In England, there would be significant legal barriers to it. However, we offer a conditional ethical argument in favour of allowing compulsory treatment and vaccination, drawing on an ethical comparison with external constraints—such as quarantine, isolation and ‘lockdown’—that have already been authorised to control the pandemic in this jurisdiction. We argue that, if the permissive English approach to external constraints for COVID-19 has been justified, then there is a case for a similarly permissive approach to compulsory medical interventions.
- public health ethics
- law
- ethics
- vaccination
- compulsion
- mental health law
- quarantine
- public health law
- isolation
Data availability statement
There are no data in this work.
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to copy, redistribute, remix, transform and build upon this work for any purpose, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the licence is given, and indication of whether changes were made. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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- public health ethics
- law
- ethics
- vaccination
- compulsion
- mental health law
- quarantine
- public health law
- isolation
Data availability statement
There are no data in this work.
Footnotes
Contributors TD, LF and JP all contributed with ideas and to the drafting of the manuscript. All authors have agreed to the final version.
Funding TD is funded by the European Research Council (ProtMind 819757), the Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education, and the Wellcome Trust (100705/Z/12/Z). LF is funded by the British Academy (PF170028). JP is funded by the Uehiro Foundation on Ethics and Education.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
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