The pandemic has ushered in a wave of difficult ethical choices. At first, there were shortages of N-95 masks, ventilators and some forms of treatment. How would these scarce resources be rationed? What about immunocompromised “essential” workers? Could they be forced to work? And later, there were different ways of distributing the vaccines. The elderly and immunocompromised people usually come first. But people with certain comorbidities might skip the line. And in some places, governments have administered vaccines based on racial preference (or a proxy like zip code).
Throughout this process, people had perverse incentives to lie. For example, a person might lie or exaggerate the extent to which they were immunocompromised. This term was widely understood. And there was no real way to link any particular health condition to COVID. A person who did not want to work in a crowded workplace was encouraged to beautify a state of health. There were similar perverse incentives for reporting “comorbidities.” Take “obesity” for example. Many people who wouldn’t typically call themselves “obese” would quickly check that box if it helped them get a vaccine sooner. There is also the issue of corruption. I know that people paid money under the table to get vaccines faster. Finally, there is the issue of testing and quarantine. We were all on the honor system. A person might be hiding their symptoms or attributing a cough to allergies. There was no way to track this stuff.
A recent paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association examines how often parents lied about COVID during the pandemic. The hill summarizes the results:
In a survey of 580 parents of children under 18, about 26% said they had misrepresented or lied about their children’s COVID-19 status, according to a study published Monday in the journal Open JAMA Network.
Of seven behaviors related to following public health guidelines, the most common behaviors were not telling someone who was spending time with their child that they suspected or knew their child had COVID-19, among 24% of respondents, and allowing their child to break quarantine, about 21 percent of respondents.
Around 19% of respondents did not have their child tested for coronavirus despite believing their child might have COVID-19.
Other behaviors included:
- Declare that their child was older than them to be able to get vaccinated (9.7% of respondents)
- Saying their child has been vaccinated when they haven’t (10.1%)
- Say their child was not vaccinated when they were (12.2%)
- And say their child didn’t need to quarantine when they really did (16.4%)
These numbers cut both ways. About the same percentage of parents lied to get their children vaccinated as parents who lied so their children wouldn’t have to be vaccinated.
These parents may have justified the lie, in the interest of protecting their children’s health, either because they thought the vaccine would help or hurt their child. Or they lied about quarantining to avoid having to keep their children out of social circles. At least in this limited respect, truth has been sacrificed during the pandemic. I suspect these sorts of lies can be extrapolated to wide ranges of behavior in these volatile times.