One of the key lessons from the Toronto SARS experience was that health care institutions and their staff could benefit from the development of ethical frameworks for decision-making [12] . The intention of this section is not to systematically derivate from normative theory the values and principles in the framework. This paper has a more narrow focus -it is an example of applied/practical ethics that attempts to introduce and articulate values that are already commonly accepted. It is not our intention to comprehensively defend the values in the framework, but rather to show from which areas of scholarship they were drawn, articulate their relevance to pandemic planning, and to demonstrate their discursive legitimacy through a process of stakeholder engagement and vetting. To our knowledge, no other pandemic planning process has attempted to a) develop an ethical framework to guide pandemic influenza planning and b) assess an ethical framework's robustness and resonance in the community of its intended users. Thus, the significance of the procedural elements of the development of the framework is not to be minimized, nor are the insights we have gleaned from implementing the framework in health care organisations and in a governmental setting.