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. 2021 Dec;24(4):487-492.
doi: 10.1007/s11019-021-10045-0. Epub 2021 Aug 16.

Resource allocation in the Covid-19 health crisis: are Covid-19 preventive measures consistent with the Rule of Rescue?

Julian W März  1 , Søren Holm  2   3 , Michael Schlander  4   5   6
Affiliations

Resource allocation in the Covid-19 health crisis: are Covid-19 preventive measures consistent with the Rule of Rescue?

Julian W März et al. Med Health Care Philos. 2021 Dec.

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to a health crisis of a scale unprecedented in post-war Europe. In response, a large amount of healthcare resources have been redirected to Covid-19 preventive measures, for instance population-wide vaccination campaigns, large-scale SARS-CoV-2 testing, and the large-scale distribution of protective equipment (e.g., N95 respirators) to high-risk groups and hospitals and nursing homes. Despite the importance of these measures in epidemiological and economic terms, health economists and medical ethicists have been relatively silent about the ethical rationales underlying the large-scale allocation of healthcare resources to these measures. The present paper seeks to encourage this debate by demonstrating how the resource allocation to Covid-19 preventive measures can be understood through the paradigm of the Rule of Rescue, without claiming that the Rule of Rescue is the sole rationale of resource allocation in the Covid-19 pandemic.

Keywords: Covid-19 pandemic; Ethics of resource allocation; Resource allocation in healthcare; Rule of Rescue.

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Conflict of interest statement

All authors declare that they have no competing interest.

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