Reactions of Bioethics to the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Last year, the three waves of the infection with SARS-CoV-2 generated immense challenges for the global healthcare, requiring healthcare systems to adjust care models and to design, within safety parameters, the ways of performing research. Within the circumstances of the new medical context of COVID-19 pandemic, bioethics provided efficient support, both in medical practice and scientific research. Through its interventions, bioethics tried to cover the most important aspects involved in the interaction with patient, ensuring quality standards of the medical act, complying with epidemiologic security requirements and ensuring conditions for the safety of the patient, of the medical staff and of the community in general. Due to these endeavors, bioethics placed itself in the focal point of the debates upon which legal and management regulations were founded, concurrently assuming the necessity of notifications and periodic revisions of the professional ethics codes, therefore envisioning an optimal adjustment to the pandemic context. This paper follows the way in which bioethics maintains updated its role and the significance of its intervention in the medical act, as well as necessary orientations and landmarks in guiding medical care following global ethical considerations, with the aim to help medical providers to take the best decisions, and when these are made, to ensure that the reasons for the choice are the correct ones.