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Ethical considerations of the vaccine development process and vaccination: a scoping review

BACKGROUND: Various vaccines have been developed and distributed worldwide to control and cope with COVID-19 disease. To ensure vaccines benefit the global community, the ethical principles of beneficence, justice, non-maleficence, and autonomy should be examined and adhered to in the process of dev...

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Autores principales: Jalilian, Habib, Amraei, Mahdi, Javanshir, Elnaz, Jamebozorgi, Khosro, Faraji-Khiavi, Farzad
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10013982/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36918888
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-023-09237-6
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author Jalilian, Habib
Amraei, Mahdi
Javanshir, Elnaz
Jamebozorgi, Khosro
Faraji-Khiavi, Farzad
author_facet Jalilian, Habib
Amraei, Mahdi
Javanshir, Elnaz
Jamebozorgi, Khosro
Faraji-Khiavi, Farzad
author_sort Jalilian, Habib
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Various vaccines have been developed and distributed worldwide to control and cope with COVID-19 disease. To ensure vaccines benefit the global community, the ethical principles of beneficence, justice, non-maleficence, and autonomy should be examined and adhered to in the process of development, distribution, and implementation. This study, therefore, aimed to examine ethical considerations of vaccine development and vaccination processes. METHODS: A scoping review of the literature was conducted based on the Arkesy and O’Malley protocol to identify eligible studies published until November 2021. We searched Web of Science, PubMed, Scopus, and SciELO databases. The search was conducted using combinations of Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) search terms and keywords for Ethics, COVID-19, and vaccines in abstract, keywords, and title fields to retrieve potentially relevant publications. We included any study that reported one of the four principles of medical ethics: autonomy, justice, non-maleficence, and beneficence in the COVID-19 vaccine development and distribution and implementation of vaccinations. Letters, notes, protocols, and brief communications were excluded. In addition, we searched gray literature to include relevant studies (ProQuest database, conferences, and reports). Data were analyzed using framework analysis. RESULTS: In total, 43 studies were included. Ethical considerations concluded two themes: (1) production and (2) distribution and vaccination. The production process consisted of 16 codes and 4 main Categories, distribution and vaccination process consisted of 12 codes and 4 main Categories. Moreover, the ethical considerations of special groups were divided into four main groups: health care workers (HCWs) (five codes), children and adolescents (five codes), the elderly (one code), and ethnic and racial minorities (three codes). CONCLUSION: Due to the externalities of pandemics and the public and social benefits and harms of vaccination, it is not feasible to adhere to all four principles of medical ethics simultaneously and perfectly. This issue confronts individuals and policymakers with several moral dilemmas. It seems that decision-making based on the balance between social benefit and social harm is a better criterion in this regard, and the final decision should be made based on maximizing the public benefit and minimizing the public harm.
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spelling pubmed-100139822023-03-15 Ethical considerations of the vaccine development process and vaccination: a scoping review Jalilian, Habib Amraei, Mahdi Javanshir, Elnaz Jamebozorgi, Khosro Faraji-Khiavi, Farzad BMC Health Serv Res Research BACKGROUND: Various vaccines have been developed and distributed worldwide to control and cope with COVID-19 disease. To ensure vaccines benefit the global community, the ethical principles of beneficence, justice, non-maleficence, and autonomy should be examined and adhered to in the process of development, distribution, and implementation. This study, therefore, aimed to examine ethical considerations of vaccine development and vaccination processes. METHODS: A scoping review of the literature was conducted based on the Arkesy and O’Malley protocol to identify eligible studies published until November 2021. We searched Web of Science, PubMed, Scopus, and SciELO databases. The search was conducted using combinations of Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) search terms and keywords for Ethics, COVID-19, and vaccines in abstract, keywords, and title fields to retrieve potentially relevant publications. We included any study that reported one of the four principles of medical ethics: autonomy, justice, non-maleficence, and beneficence in the COVID-19 vaccine development and distribution and implementation of vaccinations. Letters, notes, protocols, and brief communications were excluded. In addition, we searched gray literature to include relevant studies (ProQuest database, conferences, and reports). Data were analyzed using framework analysis. RESULTS: In total, 43 studies were included. Ethical considerations concluded two themes: (1) production and (2) distribution and vaccination. The production process consisted of 16 codes and 4 main Categories, distribution and vaccination process consisted of 12 codes and 4 main Categories. Moreover, the ethical considerations of special groups were divided into four main groups: health care workers (HCWs) (five codes), children and adolescents (five codes), the elderly (one code), and ethnic and racial minorities (three codes). CONCLUSION: Due to the externalities of pandemics and the public and social benefits and harms of vaccination, it is not feasible to adhere to all four principles of medical ethics simultaneously and perfectly. This issue confronts individuals and policymakers with several moral dilemmas. It seems that decision-making based on the balance between social benefit and social harm is a better criterion in this regard, and the final decision should be made based on maximizing the public benefit and minimizing the public harm. BioMed Central 2023-03-14 /pmc/articles/PMC10013982/ /pubmed/36918888 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-023-09237-6 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research
Jalilian, Habib
Amraei, Mahdi
Javanshir, Elnaz
Jamebozorgi, Khosro
Faraji-Khiavi, Farzad
Ethical considerations of the vaccine development process and vaccination: a scoping review
title Ethical considerations of the vaccine development process and vaccination: a scoping review
title_full Ethical considerations of the vaccine development process and vaccination: a scoping review
title_fullStr Ethical considerations of the vaccine development process and vaccination: a scoping review
title_full_unstemmed Ethical considerations of the vaccine development process and vaccination: a scoping review
title_short Ethical considerations of the vaccine development process and vaccination: a scoping review
title_sort ethical considerations of the vaccine development process and vaccination: a scoping review
topic Research
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10013982/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36918888
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-023-09237-6
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