Pandemics at Work: Convergence of Epidemiology and Ethics

Abstract

Like COVID-19, new infectious disease outbreaks emerge almost annually, and studies predict that this trend will continue due to a variety of factors, including an aging population, ease of travel, and globalization of the economy. In response to episodic public health crises, governments and organizations develop, implement, and enforce policies, procedures, protocols, and programs. The epidemiological triad is both a model of disease causation and fundamentally used to design and deploy such control measures. Here we adapt this model to the workplace setting and use the epidemiological triad to characterize the related ethical challenges in implementing the control measures employers face as a guide for a workplace intervention framework. Through this approach, our aim is to show how an integrated ethical framework, grounded in epidemiological principles, has important implications for how we categorize, understand, and resolve the difficult decisions that emerge in the workplace under pandemic conditions.

The Moral Foundations of Vaccine Passports

“…Prior studies have also used combinations of foundations to increase messaging efficacy (Wolsko, 2017 ). This is one of the least restrictive means of improving the uptake of such policy, which has been put forward as a guiding ethical principle in designing policy pertaining to vaccine passports (Thornton et al, 2022 ). Policy communicators should note, however, that studies examining the effect of the vaccine passport on vaccination attitudes have found null results (de Figueiredo et al, 2021 ; Sotis et al, 2021 ).…”

“…MFT is, therefore, highly applicable to issues that have both moral and political considerations, such as the COVID-19 vaccination (Albrecht, 2022 ; Sharfstein et al, 2021 ) or vaccine passports (The Economist, 2021 ). Furthermore, due to the centrality of the liberty foundation to ethical debates (Thornton et al, 2022 ) about vaccine passports (Grossin et al, 2021 ), we also examined the impact of the liberty foundation in this study.…”

Application of an Epidemiological Triangle Model on Prevalent Sexually Transmitted Diseases among Married Women

“…The epidemiological triangle model is a crucial tool for developing and implementing such preventive interventions as well as a model of illness causation. The epidemiological triangle model's main objectives are to better understand how a disease spreads, identify the factors that led to disease transmission, and provide guidance for choosing an efficient disease control strategy [9] [10].…”