Discussions about the role that age should or should not play when allocating medical resources during the COVID-19 crisis have been deeply revealing. Probably no bioethicist would come out in favor of basing such decisions simply on (older) age, though there is no problem finding such opinions on Twitter. But many bioethicists heavily rely on likelihood of recovery and number of years of life expected post-treatment in their favored allocation schemes, which in the context of COVID-19 will frequently come down to the same thing. In addition, constructs like the 'life cycle' or the 'fair innin ..read more

Like serious health emergencies tend to do, COVID-19 is magnifying pre-existing economic, social and political problems in countries around the world. The United States is a glaring example: having responded slowly to the pandemic threat, it finds itself approaching 50,000 confirmed COVID-19 related deaths, shortages of personal protective equipment and other medical necessities, and a massive economic meltdown in a society with a threadbare social safety net. Unemployment has skyrocketed. Businesses are going bankrupt. The general chaos is further stirred by a science-averse and business-frie ..read more

I have not been active on this blog for quite some time. The causes are multiple, but one comes to my mind first: do people still read blogs, anyway? The doubt is de-motivational. Over the last years, it seems that more and more bloggers have switched over to Twitter, which is to say that they have stopped posting longer pieces beyond 'threads' on that platform. You can see Twitter's attraction: less of an investment in time and greater likelihood of immediate feedback or impact. It fits better in our life-work imbalence. This blog too has been associated with a Twitter account since 2012 (@Bi ..read more

My colleagues and I have written about this before: stimulating bioethics in Francophone African countries involves a number of significant hurdles. First, there is language. Bioethics is predominantly expressed in English: the journals are in English, the majority of degree programs in bioethics are conducted in English, as are the vast majority of books, conferences, scholarship opportunities and so on. Designing a bioethics course makes this crystal clear: what readings are you going to assign? The second hurdle is that French-language bioethics (mainly from France and Quebec) is generally ..read more