Fall 2023 Colloquium Series: Professor Gerard Vong

 

 

 

Wednesday, October 25th
2:00 pm – 3:30 pm
708 Broadway, Room 801

 

Using the recent COVID-19 and MPox international outbreaks as examples, I argue that one ethically important step in preparing for future disease outbreaks is setting up lottery systems for the allocation of scarce healthcare resources.  Firstly, I summarize and evaluate the philosophical, historical, and public support for fairly and ethically allocating scarce resources by lottery in paradigmatic cases where we are unable to provide those resources to all equally-worthy potential beneficiaries.  Secondly, I argue that future outbreaks are foreseeable to result in such paradigmatic cases due to current public health resource planning and stockpile policy, lack of research and data for new or unprioritized infectious agents, and logistical challenges in outbreak response.  Finally, I argue that lotteries ethically ought to be designed such that (i)  information about them can be transparently shared in different languages with patients with varied heath literacy, (ii) they should be able to respond to changes in the demand and supply of the resource over time, and (iii) they can exclude specific earlier lottery entrants from later lottery allocations in order to promote population-level equity.

 

Gerard Vong (DPhil) is Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Arts in Bioethics program at Emory University.  He is currently on sabbatical as a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University.  Prior to joining Emory, Dr. Vong was a faculty fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, an assistant professor of philosophy at Fordham University, and a Jane Eliza Procter fellow at Princeton University. 

Dr Vong’s research focuses on the fair, ethical, and systematic distribution of benefits and risks, with a focus on scarce healthcare goods.  Dr. Vong is also active in pandemic response policy, including co-authoring COVID-19 critical care allocation guidelines for Emory Healthcare’s 11 hospital system and serving as ethics advisor to the CDC’s MPox vaccine policy workgroup.