This book draws attention to the non-biological—political, economic, societal and cultural—variables shaping both the emergence and persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the global response to it, with a particular focus on political decisionmakers’ role in the domestic and international politics surrounding the process of the pandemic.

Chapter 1: Introduction and Analytic Framework.- Part I: War on Paper.- Chapter 2: Ethics in Governance: Pandemic Response as a Vital Interest.- Chapter 3: The Ethics of Response to Plague on Distant Shores.- Chapter 4: The Ethics of Practices in Pandemic Response.- Part II: Friction.- Chapter 5: The Need/Failure to Prepare and Prevent.- Chapter 6: The Need/Failure to Anticipate and Pre-empt.- Chapter 7: The Need/Failure to React, Adequately Prioritise and Persevere.- Chapter 8: The Need/Failure to Honestly Account and Take Responsibility.- Chapter 9: Lessons, Recommendations, Conclusion.

‘Ethical Failures of the COVID-19 Response insightfully anticipates the coming pandemic post-mortems by focusing empirically and conceptually on decisionmakers and decision-making from Wuhan to Omicron. An essential text.’—Stephen Taylor, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, Queen Mary University of London, UK‘Future historians of science, medicine, and public health examining the Covid pandemic will rely on Péter Marton’s acute, multi-dimensional analysis.’—Matthew Adamson, Professor of the History of Science and Technology, McDaniel College, USA ‘This book is an important contribution conceptualising the key mistakes and failures of decision-making from an ethical perspective.’—Scott Romaniuk, Visiting Fellow, University of South Wales, UKThis book draws attention to the non-biological—political, economic, societal and cultural—variables shaping both the emergence and persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic and the global response to it, with a particular focus on political decisionmakers’ role in the domestic and international politics surrounding the process of the pandemic. The book identifies the strategic and underlying ethical failures of decision making, using a process-tracing approach to reconstruct considerations, decisions and actions by key leaders—interested in thus weaving a global narrative of the response. The author highlights key speech acts, and interprets the causal implications embedded in a chronological and contextualised appraisal of events, statements and public health measures. The book further discusses the normative ethics of pandemic response, and presents lessons drawn from the present experience. It also offers a normative analysis taking into consideration pre-pandemic guidelines for response, including in the literature of public health ethics and pandemic preparedness plans. PéterMarton is Associate Professor at Corvinus University, and Adjunct Professor at McDaniel College, Budapest, Hungary.

“Future historians of science, medicine, and public health examining the Covid pandemic will rely on Péter Marton’s acute, multi-dimensional analysis of the decisional processes that unfolded as populations around the globe responded to the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Failure will loom large, its source as much political and social as it was the contagiousness of the pathogen itself.” (Matthew Adamson, Professor of the History of Science and Technology, McDaniel College, USA)“This book provides a bold, both empirically and theoretically well supported, normative assessment of the global handling of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. It draws equally skilfully on the medical science of disease outbreaks, on social scientific approaches to policy-making, and on public health ethics, combining the three in a mutually enriching manner. This book is a must-read for anyone from any of these three fields who wants to better understand why pandemic responses succeed or fail.” (Viktor Friedmann, Associate Professor of International Relations at Budapest Metropolitan University, Hungary) “In health policy, it is indispensable to view social and other non-biological factors of health as key factors in tackling pandemics. As a case in point, scores of people have died or were hospitalized without even knowing whether the pathogen causing this had emerged from a natural source. Preparedness to manage the dynamics of social media and to effectively engage with the challenge of infodemics has further proved the need to take a broad, multidisciplinary view, as the opposite has proved inadequate and at times even counterproductive in several countries. This book precisely explores the significance and role of these factors for the future.” (András Falus, Professor Emeritus of Immunology, Semmelweis University, Hungary)“Probably no one is perfectly satisfied with the record of decision-making during the response to the COVID pandemic, for one reason or another.This book is an important scholarly contribution that conceptualises key mistakes and failures along the way from an ethical perspective, and may serve as an important benchmark in future debates on the subject. A particularly welcome aspect of Marton's approach is realisation of the need to distinguish between ethical failures as such on the one hand, and cognitive errors and values-based considerations on the other, in a substantive analysis of the process of the pandemic that benefits from the author's background in policy analysis and international security. (Scott Romaniuk, international security scholar and Visiting Fellow, International Center for Policing and Security, University of South Wales, UK)“The world was unprepared for COVID-19. Ethical Failures of the COVID-19 Response insightfully anticipates the coming pandemic post-mortems by focusing empirically and conceptually on decisionmakers and decision-making from Wuhan to Omicron. An essential text for those working in and around pandemic preparedness, it documents for posterity the decisions that shaped the pandemic and develops a critical framework for rebuilding pandemic preparedness beyond COVID-19.” (Stephen Taylor, Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, Queen Mary University of London, UK) “Exposing tensions between moral imperatives and collective expediency which underlie the recognition that preventing pandemics is a global public good, Marton opens a hugely important arena for debate and reflection. With impressive breadth, he delivers sharp insights into the role of consequential ‘decision-making’ underpinning COVID-19 response policies.  The book’s ambition to illuminate how (foreign) policy can be ethical in a procedural and public health sense is, in and of itself, an ethical imperative of the highest order.  Its narrative of how better to avoid harm is all the more urgent as impact from COVID-19 increasingly tracks fault-lines of social inequity, and diseaseX retains a seemingly permanent placeholder slot among WHO’s priority disease threats.” (Chris Lyttleton, Honorary Professor of Anthropology, Macquarie University, Australia)

Explores the shortcomings of responses to COVID-19 Highlights non-biological — political, economic, societal and cultural — factors shaping public health Applies normative analytical approaches to shed light on deviations from the desirable public health practice