Epistemic Injustice in Global Health Ethics: The Case of COVID-19 Pandemic
Ehsan Shamsi Gooshki1, Ehsan Shamsi Gooshki2, Monash Bioethics Center, Monash University Melbourne2, Tehran Tehran 1Monash Bioethics Center, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia2Medical Ethics and History of Medicine Research Center, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Tehran, Iran
Abstract
Epistemic Injustice in Global Health Ethics: The Case of COVID-19 Pandemic
Amirhossein Mardani
Alireza Parsapour
Seyed Ali Enjoo
Ehsan Shamsi-Gooshki
Despite phenomenal progress in medicine, health is significantly inequitable globally and disparities are widening, with the most vulnerable people having the least access to healthcare. While previous evidence demonstrated a similar south-north divide in the bioethics literature, the present study assessed the bioethics literature during the COVID-19 pandemic (2019-2022) using a systematic search approach in the peer-reviewed journals, using related ethics and COVID keywords. The relevant criteria of 4397 included papers such as the journal, countries and institutions of authors, the keywords’ frequency and trend, co-authorship networks among authors, institutions, and countries, international collaborations, the pattern of citations and citation networks and major thematic areas were extracted through Scientometrics methods using software such as Vosviewer, Bibexecl, and UCINET. Finally, the resulting data were qualitatively analyzed by the research team consisting of three bioethicists. The keywords were categorized based on various domains of bioethics. The pattern of more frequently used keywords such as resource allocation, research ethics, and healthcare access was discussed and compared with other aspects of the pandemic and various criteria of countries, authors, regions, and the time.
The study findings show that the voices of scholars from the global South, who are more impacted by global health disparities and emergencies, were relatively absent in global health ethics literature during the COVID-19 pandemic which reflects a global epistemological injustice and low intellectual and scholarly capacities within the LMICs.
Biography
Bio to come