How Do We Decide Who Gets Ventilators?

Insight from an ethics expert

How do we decide who gets ventilators? A social ethics experts calls out ventilator allocation guidelines for having “explicitly and unambiguously judged the lives of young, able-bodied people to be worth more and to contribute more to the ‘greatest good’ than those of disabled, ill, and elderly people.”

“If we become accustomed to the idea that some people’s deaths are ‘acceptable losses,’” she writes, “then we lose our ability to see a world in which no preventable deaths are acceptable.”

In the Time of Covid-19, Ventilators Are Scarce. How Do We Decide Who Gets Them?