Examining the Ethics of Health Care and COVID-19—Dr. James Thomas—Department of Epidemiology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Finding Genius Podcast
Richard Jacobs
4.4 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 23 May 2020
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Associate professor at UNC Department of Epidemiology, Dr. James Thomas, joins the show to discuss his line of work in health care ethics, and how it has changed in response to the recent COVID-19 outbreak.
Tune in to learn the following:
- How medical ethics and public health ethics differ, and why the distinction is so important to understand
- What the Siracusa principles are and how they apply to the COVID-19 pandemic
- How politics are muddying the waters of communication about COVID-19, and why this is problematic
- How the government-led War on Drugs campaign caused the US to lead the world in incarceration rates, and how this disproportionately affected African American communities
For much of his career, Dr. James Thomas has studied the social determinants of infectious diseases, focusing particularly on the effects of mass incarceration on the communities left behind.
Over the last decade, he has done a lot of work involving health information systems in developing countries. Just as he was moving toward a study of digital data and how they are used in public health, COVID-19 hit.
Dr. Thomas discusses the social determinants of this virus, which includes a look at how incarcerated individuals are being affected by the virus, the level of constraint being placed on the general public in this country and across the globe, the unprecedented implementation of digital surveillance in China and the US, why COVID-19 presents unique challenges to health care ethics and decision-making, what he sees as the primary ethical mishap of this pandemic, what he thinks will happen as states begin to reopen across the country, and so much more.
To learn more about the current pandemic, Dr. Thomas suggests visiting the CDC website.
Transcript
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| 0:33.0 | That is Richard Jacobs. |
| 0:35.0 | Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with the Finding Genius Podcast. |
| 0:41.0 | I have Dr. James Thomas. he's an associate professor in the |
| 0:44.8 | Department of Epidemiology at University at North Carolina at Chapel Hill. |
| 0:49.3 | He's working on the public health effects, the ethics of coronavirus, SARS-Covi2 or COVID. |
| 0:56.0 | He has an interest in complex systems and studying them and modeling them and doing network analysis and, know we'll get into his research so |
| 1:04.0 | Dr Thomas thanks for coming how you doing I'm doing well good to talk to you so |
| 1:08.9 | what was your typical course of research until the, you know, the recent |
| 1:15.3 | coronavirus outbreak and how has it changed since the outbreak? |
| 1:19.1 | Well, my typical line of research is looking at social determinants of infectious diseases. |
| 1:26.6 | For example, I spent some time looking at the effects of mass incarceration on communities |
| 1:31.5 | and how that affects mostly those left behind. |
| 1:35.0 | There are others who are studying the people who are in prison, but I was studying the communities that they were taken from and how mass incarceration affected those and increased teen |
| 1:47.1 | births, increased sexually transmitted diseases and some other things. |
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