Ethical issues of COVID-19 – the emerging Big Five

From an ethical perspective, the pandemic is like a prism: it helps us see the spectrum of issues clearly and distinctly. In our contribution we shall outline what we consider top ethics concerns, grouped around five moral and societal core values: autonomy, privacy, equity, proportionality and trust. We then proceed to probe these concerns a bit further with some examples around vaccination of health care professionals, contact tracing, global access to vaccines, lockdowns, and crisis communication. We are quite aware that the dynamic, cross-sectoral, multilevel impact of both the pandemic and the measures taken to contain it is too complex to be captured by a simple short list of ethical issues. This is a huge challenge for healthcare leaders and healthcare professionals. To keep a clear and current overview of this moving target, we propose a value-based checklist, centered around five core moral values which are unlikely to change over time, that will allow healthcare leaders to systematically analyze ethical issues arising in their institutions. Each section of the checklist (centered around one of the core values) includes a dynamic presentation of emerging topics (in the form of a word cloud or any other suitable format) that can and will change, generated with a natural language processing (NLP) approach, using an open-source topic tracking algorithm as a means of tackling the exploding volume of literature on bioethics and COVID-19, allowing for quick overview of thematic priorities.Article accepted by NEJM Catalys