Ethical Aspects in COVID-19 Vaccination (Raboan Discussion Forum)

Raboan Online held by Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanity (CBMH) on Wednesday (6/10) was back with a topic very much relevant to the world situation this day, “Ethical Aspects in COVID-19 Vaccination”. The speaker on this afternoon was Dr. dr. Iqbal Mochtar, MPH, MKKK, DipiCard, DoccMed, Sp.Ok, who is based in Qatar and is the Head of Middle East Indonesian Doctors Association, who also oftentimes talks about ethical issues in medicine. All the while, dr. Nur Azid Mahardinata from CBMH tackled the role of moderator in this discussion.

Vaccination in COVID-19 pandemic to this day is known to be the biggest vaccination campaign in history and is an urgent modality on resolving said pandemic. Nevertheless, the reality in practice shows a huge disparity between high-income countries and developing countries in vaccine distribution. A quite shocking number was revealed by dr. Iqbal where 46% of world population have already received their vaccination dose, but developing countries donate only 2.3% of that number.

Vaccine nationalism phenomenon, where a country stocks vaccines in a great number  even three to eight times its population, that widely occurred at the beginning of the pandemic turns out to be ethically justifiable. Conflict between the country’s duty to protect its people and the moral obligation to human in general, that is to say conflict between local moral and universal moral could be seen here.

“As an individual, we’re not only living as the entity of our own self, but also as the core element of the society”, dr. Iqbal urged to see any ethical problems locally and universally during discussion.

No less interesting than previous discussions, a discourse then arose when talking about mandatory vaccine. Surely there is an ethical discord between individual values, especially autonomy principle, and the public goods, which is a common occurrence but much more prominent in a pandemic. Public goods is priority, but individual rights should not be infringed.

To this day, WHO doesn’t support mandatory vaccine during this COVID-19 pandemic. Widely seen policy are “no jab no pay”, or “no jab no play”, or making the state of being vaccinated as mandatory requirement to visit certain places or do certain activities. Then, could these policies be seen as half hearted effort of mandatory vaccine and country’s inability to bear the social politic consequences of making vaccine mandatory, one of the forum participant Prof. dr. Teguh Haryo Sasongko, Ph.D. bluntly asked.

Public health ethics and clinical ethics do not always have to go against each other, instead a meticulous consideration of time and urgency is needed, was how dr. Iqbal concluded his presentation.

Watch full video here