Report: Access to information during a Public Health Crisis

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a controversial issue related to the U.S. Government’s withholding of information regarding the utility of face masks for the public, which resulted in higher transmission rates and the death of thousands of Americans. This action was partly driven by the fear that a formal recommendation for all to wear masks was backed by peer-reviewed research. The potential consequences of a mask mandate with no concrete scientific backing could be unimaginable. 

In this report, I present why this policy action, which might seem unethical on the surface, was justifiable and outline actionable steps that can be taken in future health crises given the insights of the governmental response against COVID-19. When analyzing the ethical implications of the mask recommendations, I explore the definition of nudging and consider the ethical requirements, which should follow an ethical nudging intervention. In particular, I categorize the behavior of withholding information from the general public as nudging and look at the argument that the policy is unethical because it lacked match and transparency of the intervention performed. Then, I present new guidelines for a “substantial choice” offered by Thomas Nilsen to justify the morality of the government’s actions. Concluding my ethical analysis, I make use of the utility principle of utilitarianism to argue that health workers were rightfully almost exclusively provided with the highest-level protection equipment. To avoid similar future ethical conflicts, I propose a post-mortem dialogic approach between the U.S. Government, public health officials, and the public to substantiate a robust process of disseminating information during a public health crisis. In this proposal for future course of action, I recommend Mill’s harm principle as the guiding principle for all policy decisions made.