Why do we need ethics more than ever during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Abstract

The coronavirus (Covid-19) suddenly entered our lives by re-introducing us to quarantine and by changing our lifestyle. The war against coronavirus is tough and physicians are trying to cope with a lot of limitations under such pandemic conditions. It is clear that a large part of the work is the responsibility of physicians. This study focuses on ethics issues about physician-patient relationships in the frame of the public health measures, during the current Covid-19 pandemic and discusses how to address them so that main research ethics principles are preserved. It discusses the ethical dilemmas physicians are facing during Covid-19 pandemics, such as balancing between the individual and social benefit of patients, coping with restricted medical resources, serving outside the medical field of expertise, in case of the mandatory pandemic determining the limits of how altruistic a physician has to be, questioning the compulsory off*label drug usage and grounding the necessity of ethicist in the Covid-19 scientific committees. © 2021, William S. Hein & Co., Inc. All rights reserved.