As we move through the pandemic and start to imagine life on the other side, it’s appropriate that there will be a range of views about how we deal with the aftermath and how to prepare for similar events in the future.
We should encourage opinions that examine our response as a nation: what we did right, what we did wrong, and what could we do better.
That being the case, I’ve been left wondering at the amount of oxygen being given to a particular branch of ‘pandemic analysis’, one that sees cost-benefit analysis taking centre stage, with all the disturbing suggestions that follow.
Janet Albrechtsen’s op-ed in The Australian, ‘Old or young — every life has a different value and we accept that’, is the most recent. While the article is more subtle than its headline suggests, I was left with a deeply uncomfortable question: do we really accept that?
Albrechtsen’s article is pitched to overcome some of the tropes floating around in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. She refers to them as ‘straw men’: ‘Some say we should put people ahead of economics’ or ‘Some say it is wrong to ignore the old.’
A straw man is a form of fallacy. It sets up a false idea of an argument, and attacks that idea rather than the argument itself. Albrechtsen suggests this is unhelpful in considering the ethical questions raised by COVID-19, and should be challenged. And I agree.
'Let’s imagine ourselves in the shoes of different people in our community to test whether our approaches are just.'
But so too is the straw man’s close relation, the ‘bait and switch’, which arranges a set of statements that everyone knows is true, then follows quickly with a contested claim, in the hope that readers will accept this along with the others.
Let’s start with some uncontested statements in relation to the allocation of health resources. Resources are limited in a pandemic. More so than in normal times. Doctors sometimes need to make decisions about who will get access to a health care intervention and who won’t. In a pandemic that happens with a greater frequency and intensity. No one I’ve spoken to in the past few months disagrees with these. These are the bait.
But the idea that in choosing ‘who gets what’, doctors are making judgments about the value or ‘price’ of individual lives, and that this somehow legitimises governments doing the same? There’s the switch. That seems to