Abstract

The end of the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to be achieved through large-scale vaccination of the global population. So far vaccination against COVID-19 has been shown to reduce mortality and morbidity, minimize economic and social burdens, and ensure that people resume their everyday activities. Fair and equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines is critical in ensuring ethical distribution globally. This paper discusses ethical allocation of COVID-19 vaccines, focusing on models that have been proposed for global allocation, as well as provides a discussion on a Christian response to the pandemic.

Keywords: COVID-19 Pandemic, SARS-CoV-2, Vaccines, Global allocation, Vaccine Hesitancy, Equity, Justice

In this paper I explain four features of kindness by examining how four artworks depict them: Giotto di Bondone’s painting of St. Francis of Assisi giving his robe to a beggar, the character Bishop Charles-Francois Myriel in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, the person Adam in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and the role of Sonya Semyonovna Marmeladov in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. These four examples describe kindness as supererogatory, altruistic, a belief about how the world ought to be, and the possibility of unction. With this understanding of kindness, I examine the most likely moral motives of the physician in physician-assisted suicide and find that the practice does not display the four characteristics of kindness but rather displays the emotion (though it may be sincere) of condescending pity towards the unfortunate people who deem their lives are devoid of the value to live.