News Archive
Professor Orenstein: Ethical Issues Abound in COVID-19 Treatments
05/26/2020
When a promising treatment for COVID-19 is in short supply, how do doctors and hospitals decide who will benefit? The online news site Healthline asked Daniel G. Orenstein, Visiting Assistant Professor of Law at IU McKinney, to weigh in for the article, “Remdesivir May Help Treat COVID-19. So Who Gets It First?"
As of May 13, the United States has had more than 1.3 million confirmed cases of COVID-19, with numbers still rising, the article notes. Remdesivir is one of the few drugs that has shown clinical promise, but until availability increases dramatically, hospitals are left to decide which patients get the drug and which ones don’t. In states that haven’t received any remdesivir yet, physicians need to have difficult conversations with patients and their families about why they don’t have access to the drug.
Orenstein says certain overarching ethical principles can help guide these decisions, including transparency, something that was lacking in the government’s initial allocation of remdesivir to hospitals.
“What are the criteria being used to make the decision? Who is making the decision? That needs to be clearly communicated to everyone involved,” Orenstein said.
