ABC15 NEWS-PHOENIX: “People who’ve experienced military triage and having to make these decisions on the battlefield are sometimes scarred for life by this. It’s not something you ever really forget,” said Dr. Matthew Wynia, Director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities.
JOURNAL OF GERIATRIC ONCOLOGY: Over 230 medical oncologists nationwide responded to the first study exploring oncologists' perceptions regarding MM for older adults with cancer, in which CBH Research Director Eric Campbell, PhD is a co-author. The research suggests that perceptions regarding the breadth of MM's benefits rather than its risks drive their views on its utility for older adults.
TIME: “You have some stakeholders who want to downplay things and make it sound like we’ve had a wonderful response, it all worked beautifully,” says Center Director Dr. Matthew Wynia, who is a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee studying the issue. “And you’ve got others who say, ‘No, no, no. Look at all the people who were harmed.’”
PBS: Amid shocking reports of the U.S. government’s treatment of detained migrant children, Warren Binford, a lawyer who visited one of the facilities in Texas, discusses the squalid living conditions as well as the resignation of acting Customs and Border Protection Commissioner, John Sanders. Professor Binford is Director of the Clinical Law Program at Willamette University, and will be joining our faculty in July, 2020.
KENNEDY INSTITUTE OF ETHICS JOURNAL: Covid-19 like other outbreaks, amplifies both person-centered, explicit racism and the structural, institutionalized racism that is responsible for racial health inequalities in the US. Author and Center faculty Daniel Goldberg, JD, PhD, says, "Laws and policies should be prioritized as primary anti-stigma mechanisms.
CBS4 NEWS: CU Boulder graduate student Gavriel Kleinwaks is one of nearly 29,000 people who have signed up to be willingly infected with the coronavirus. CBH faculty Matthew DeCamp, MD, PhD questions if it's ethical to infect people with a potentially lethal virus with no reliable treatment.
DAILY BEAST: Center Director Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH commented about UCSF Professor Dr. John Balmes, walking the ethical line of using ones university position to further an advocacy agenda.
Congratulations to Clinical Nurse Ethicist Karen Jones, RN, RNC-NIC and Associate Professor Curtis Coughlin, MBe, MS who recently passed the Healthcare Ethics Consultant-Certified (HEC-C) exam!
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF BIOETHICS: This paper discusses resource allocation and several related ethical challenges to the healthcare system and society, including how to define benefit, how to handle informed consent, the special needs of pediatric patients, how to engage communities in these difficult decisions, and how to mitigate concerns of discrimination and the effects of structural inequities
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF BIOETHICS: Apnea testing involves discontinuing the support of a mechanical ventilator in order to determine if a patient is able to initiate spontaneous breathing. Center faculty Brian M. Jackson, MD concludes that, "physicians should not proceed with apnea testing unless the patient’s decision-making surrogate has given informed consent."
NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE: Center Director and co-author Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH concludes, "To ensure the trustworthiness of the health system, disability rights advocates and health care leaders should work together to finalize crisis triage plans that save the most lives, protect the equal worth of all persons, and enhance communities’ capacity to heal in the wake of a once-in-a century pandemic."
INTERMOUNTAIN JEWISH NEWS: This time, equality is a letter to the editor from the "Lessons Learned" group of the Holocaust, Genocide and Contemporary Bioethics Program, which reminds us that the mistakes and shortcomings of medicine during the Holocaust should inform our decision-making in medical ethics during today’s pandemic. CBH Director Matthew Wynia says, “We need to be able to look back and say we made those decisions in a way that maintains the trust of the community, that maintains social cohesion, and allows us to heal.”
LUMINAS: Faculty Affiliate Roz Pierson of Luminas, conducted an online survey of over 100 oncologists across the US, to uncover the impact that the pandemic has had on their practice, patient management and treatment patterns.
CPR - COLORADO MATTERS: Center Director Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH joins a discussion about balancing Colorado's health-related restrictions with activities that bring joy and meaning to people's lives, and how the Covid guidelines impact one's physical and mental well-being.
COLORADO TIMES RECORDER: Proposals like Brauchler’s are an “illustration of how the response [to the pandemic] has been increasingly converted into a partisan issue. That’s sad because it shouldn’t be partisan,” CBH Director Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH wrote in an email to the Colorado Times Recorder. “Both Republicans and Democrats are dying of this illness – and we all care about the people in our families and communities who are at particular risk.”
NEWSWEEK: "In a fast-moving pandemic, protecting individuals' rights to privacy limits the ability of the government to protect the health of the population," said CBH Director of Research, Eric G. Campbell, PhD.
BLOOMBERG: "We're almost certainly going to have some people with non-Covid disease who are harmed, as a result of delays in their care," said Center Director Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH.
POLITIFACT: Several states credited social distancing, statewide shelter-in-place policies and other mitigation efforts aimed at slowing the spread of the Coronavirus with keeping their hospitals from being overwhelmed with patients or burning through their ventilators.
"All those measures are helping, and they’re why we didn’t run out of ventilators," said Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH, Director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities.
DENVER POST: “There’s the best way to do this and then there’s the way we’re gonna have to do this,” said Center faculty Daniel Goldberg, JD, PhD. “There’s not an ideal way. It’s not our world — it’s the virus’s world.”
ROLLING STONE: Center faculty Daniel Goldberg, JD, PhD is quoted, “Typically, having a communicable disease damages a person’s status, resulting in stigma. But an immunity card system would be the inverse, indicating when a person who is thought to be immune to the virus achieves a positive social status, along with the resulting benefits — like being able to go to work, visit friends or go to restaurants. It’s problematic from an ethical standpoint to do that on the basis of disease status.”