ArticleMonash bioethics review2025
Coercive public health policies need context-specific ethical justifications.
Article in Monash bioethics review, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Free Riding in Healthcare Through a Game-Theoretic Lens: A Cross-Domain Narrative Review and Conceptual Synthesis.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Ethical Principles in Legal Context: Vaccine Mandates During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Australia.Journal of bioethical inquiry · 2026Article
- Coercion in public health: a scoping review of definitions.BMJ public health · 2026Article
- Scope and Spatio-Temporal Patterns of Workplace Vaccination Mandates During the COVID-19 Pandemic.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Article
- A theory- and evidence-based holistic intervention to enhance the uptake of preventive eye examination among the elderly centre members.Public health in practice (Oxford, England) · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Public health policies designed to improve individual and population health may involve coercion. These coercive policies require ethical justification, and yet it is unclear in the public health ethics literature which ethical concepts might justify coercion, and what their limitations are in applying across contexts. In this paper, we analyse a number of concepts from Western bioethics, including the harm principle, paternalism, the public interest, and a duty of easy rescue. We find them plausible justifications for coercion in theory, but when applied to case studies, including HIV testing in Malawi, vaccine mandates in South Africa, and prohibitions of antibiotic use in livestock in the EU, their limitations become clear. We argue that the context-specificity of ethical justifications for coercion has been overlooked, and there is more work needed to identify context-relevant ethical justifications for coercive policies in various settings and for various populations, rather than relying on universalising Western bioethical justifications across all contexts.
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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.