Kids and Pandemic Policymaking
Sydney Campbell and Dr. Franco Carnevale, of the VOICE Childhood Ethics Research Team at McGill University in Montreal, published the research paper Children as an afterthought during COVID-19: defining a child-inclusive ethical framework for pandemic policymaking.
Following the SARS pandemic, global jurisdictions began developing ethical resource allocation frameworks for future pandemics. One which has become commonly referenced is that developed by Thompson and colleagues, which provides “a solid backbone upon which decision-makers can rest assured that their work is driven by rigorous ethical processes and principles”. However, the authors of the current paper note that “it fails to take into account the nuanced experiences and interests of children and youth (i.e. young people) in a pandemic context.”
Campbell and Carnevale’s paper revisits the Thompson et al. framework and proposes adaptations to its ethical processes and values and proposes “a new principle, namely practicability, to indicate the complex balance between what is possible and what is convenient that is required in ethically sound decisions in the context of services affecting young people”.
Noting that, in the approaches to dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, “Economic and physiological risks have been identified and positioned as scientific, public health, and research priorities, but examining COVID-19 impacts on young people has not been afforded sufficient national and international attention and urgency. Moreover, ethical concerns regarding young people’s COVID-19 related impacts and optimal approaches for reconciling these concerns have been inadequately examined.” The paper argues a moral imperative “to better address young people-related ethical concerns regarding pandemic planning efforts and discussions related to COVID-19 and any future pandemics.”
The paper posits:
Our team’s work through the COVID-19 pandemic, and in constructing this framework in particular, has highlighted a temporal element that is fundamental to the ways decisions are made in a pandemic and which impacts become priorities for decision-makers. With good reasons and intentions, the immediate physiological and economic impacts have dominated policy agendas since March 2020 and continues to do so as COVID-19 transmission declines as a perceived societal threat. However, the impacts most prominently affecting the majority of young people (though there are some exceptions) are largely future-focused – including inadequate education, delays in medical procedures, mental health impacts, socialization disruptions, economic impacts from job opportunity losses, etc. Some of these impacts will become biologically engrained in the lives of young people, with some effects surfacing many decades from now. While it is always important to focus ample attention on driving down viral spread and limiting infection as much as possible during a pandemic, the prevailing and consuming prioritization of immediate impacts will perpetuate long-term impacts for young people….
Another overarching takeaway from this framework has been the crucial nature of engaging with young people as real contributors in pandemic policy conversations, just as we would expect decision-makers to do with experts in other areas…. To be clear: young people are experts in being able to explain what they are experiencing and the impacts they are facing. So it is reasonable to include these perspectives in a collective model for pandemic policy responses….
The paper concludes, “Efforts to ensure frameworks are truly child-inclusive should be the status-quo, meaning the implications can be considered well in advance of emergency preparedness contexts.”