ArticleBioethics2021
Queue questions: Ethics of COVID-19 vaccine prioritization.
Article in Bioethics, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 60 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Credibility of Bioethics After the Gaza Genocide.Bioethics · 2026Article
- The impact of quality-adjusted life years on evaluating COVID-19 mitigation strategies: lessons from age-specific vaccination roll-out and variants of concern in Belgium (2020-2022).BMC public health · 2024Article
- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion on Editorial Boards of Global Health Journals.Asian bioethics review · 2023Article
- What Type of Person Should I Be? About the Appeal to Virtues in Public Health Interventions.Vaccines · 2023Review
- A Millian Case for Censoring Vaccine Misinformation.Journal of bioethical inquiry · 2023Article
- Drama as a Powerful Tool to Enrich Socio-scientific Argumentation.International journal of science and mathematics education · 2023Article
- Associations between vaccination and quality of life among Taiwan general population: A comparison between COVID-19 vaccines and flu vaccines.Human vaccines & immunotherapeutics · 2022Article
- Race and resource allocation: an online survey of US and UK adults' attitudes toward COVID-19 ventilator and vaccine distribution.BMJ open · 2022Article
- Prioritization of COVID-19 vaccination. The added value of the "VALIDATE" approach.Health policy (Amsterdam, Netherlands) · 2022Review
- How COVID-19 changed clinical research strategies: a global survey.The Journal of international medical research · 2022Article
- The Ethics of Selective Mandatory Vaccination for COVID-19.Public health ethics · 2022Article
- Prioritization preferences for COVID-19 vaccination are consistent across five countries.Humanities & social sciences communications · 2022Article
- Hospital staff members' preferences about who should be prioritized to receive the COVID-19 vaccine: People with or without Alzheimer's disease?Journal of aging studies · 2021Article
- COVID-19 Pandemic: Public Health Risk Assessment and Risk Mitigation Strategies.Journal of personalized medicine · 2021Review
- Queue questions: Ethics of COVID-19 vaccine prioritization.Bioethics · 2021Article
- Easing Restrictions During Vaccine Scarcity. How Mitigation Measures Help Tackling Associated Moral and Behavioral Challenges.Public health reviews · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
The rapid development of vaccines against COVID-19 represents a huge achievement, and offers hope of ending the global pandemic. At least three COVID-19 vaccines have been approved or are about to be approved for distribution in many countries. However, with very limited initial availability, only a minority of the population will be able to receive vaccines this winter. Urgent decisions will have to be made about who should receive priority for access. Current policy in the UK appears to take the view that those who are most vulnerable to COVID-19 should get the vaccine first. While this is intuitively attractive, we argue that there are other possible values and criteria that need to be considered. These include both intrinsic and instrumental values. The former are numbers of lives saved, years of life saved, quality of the lives saved, quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs), and possibly others including age. Instrumental values include protecting healthcare systems and other broader societal interests, which might require prioritizing key worker status and having dependants. The challenge from an ethical point of view is to strike the right balance among these values. It also depends on effectiveness of different vaccines on different population groups and on modelling around cost-effectiveness of different strategies. It is a mistake to simply assume that prioritizing the most vulnerable is the best strategy. Although that could end up being the best approach, whether it is or not requires careful ethical and empirical analysis.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.