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Revise policies

Policies that were effective and ethical can be maintained. Others will need adjustment, and still others will be need to be created to address identified gaps in the response.

  • Preparedness plans should be flexible enough to allow timely adaptation as new evidence about the nature of the disease arises. WHO Ethics in Pandemic Flu
  • Be responsive to community perspectives on health challenges, opportunities, and priorities for action. APHA Code of Ethics, 4.4.5.
  • Ensure that resulting interventions do not have a disproportionately negative impact on minority or otherwise vulnerable populations (including children and elders) and that there is an effort to enhance the resilience of populations and ecosystems to prevent future harm. APHA Code of Ethics, 4.2.9.
  • Consider the experiences of designing and implementing these types of policies and plans within the community in question, as well as in other similar communities, and incorporate lessons learned from these experiences into future design and implementation efforts. APHA Code of Ethics, 4.5.3.
  • Promote policies that enhance community health and well-being and collaboratively respect the privacy, dignity, and civil liberties of individuals and communities affected by the policies and plans. APHA Code of Ethics, 4.5.4.
  • Avoid unintentional stigmatization of specific groups within the community. APHA Code of Ethics, 4.5.5.
  • Aim to improve the health of – and health care for – all vulnerable populations impacted by existing disparities and inequities. APHA Code of Ethics, 4.5.6.
  • Consider and, where possible, address determinants of health that reside outside a person’s genetic endowment and personal behaviors, including the circumstances in which people grow, live, work, and age. These determinants might include individual resources, community resources, hazardous exposures, and opportunity structures. APHA Code of Ethics, 4.5.7.
  • Include impartial mechanisms for assessing the ethical appropriateness of public health policies and plans after they have been implemented, as well as mechanisms for adjusting such policies and plans to ensure continued adherence to ethical standards. APHA Code of Ethics, 4.5.10.
  • Ensure that public health policies and plans are sensitive to race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and other unique characteristics of individuals affected by the policies or plans. APHA Code of Ethics, 4.5.11.
  • Avoid infringing on individual liberties and privacy to the extent possible. APHA Code of Ethics, 4.6.3.
  • Base health promotion efforts on respect for the dignity and capability of individuals, not on strategies of stigmatization or on appeals to motivations of fear, disgust, and shame. APHA Code of Ethics, 4.7.3.
  • Engage in program planning to increase the capacity of the public health infrastructure to respond to increased need and to maintain equitable access to services. APHA Code of Ethics, 4.7.7.


What is Pandemic Ethics?

A pandemic is pervasive in scope and touches virtually every human-made system. In this dashboard, we focus on ethics in a government’s or an employer’s actions in a pandemic.

Public health ethics addresses the relationship between those governing or administrating and the population or employees they serve. They are best summarized by the Public Health Code of Ethics of the American Public Health Association.

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