Who Gets the Last Ventilator or Compensatory School Resources? Disability &amp; Deservingness during COVID-19
Creators: name: Bell, Elizabeth
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences

description: The COVID-19 crisis brings to the surface a set of fundamental questions about the politics and ethics of resource allocation: In emergency situations and under conditions of scarcity, how do we decide who should get priority for limited resources and why? While such questions are timeless, the pandemic has raised their salience, framed to pose seeming tradeoffs between “saving” the economy versus “saving” people most vulnerable to by the virus, such as those with pre-existing conditions (Obosi, 2020). But while this framing might seem to echo the sentiments of some that these groups are not worth saving and their needs should not be prioritized, there is not enough systematic data about how the public forms judgments about who is deserving of scarce resources during epidemics and other crises. Such data are crucial to understanding public concern (or disregard) for the groups most vulnerable to COVID-19, particularly people with disabilities (PWD), the elderly, and people of color. Only through understanding how the public forms these judgments can we address ways to remove prejudice from our rhetoric and policies. We intend to focus on understanding public opinion towards four ethical resource allocation dilemmas: a) Crisis Standards of Care (CSC) used by hospitals and other medical facilities to allocate scarce treatment resources, such as ventilators, b) allocation of scarce school resources for compensatory education services, c) who should get priority for vaccination, and d) public funding allocation for prevention or treatment for both COVID and HIV/AIDS. At a time when policy actors engaged in solving these dilemmas on resource allocation are desperate for evidence to inform their policies, our results will provide guidance on how stigma about groups might create policies that are harmful to vulnerable populations. Left uninterrogated, these social constructions risk exacerbating inequalities and lead to a disproportionate negative impact among marginalized groups when it comes to resources allocation during a pandemic. Similarly, in debates on allocating public funds or other scarce resources, distributional concerns are frequently invoked. Assessing the impact on public opinion of distributional arguments emphasizing the effect of policies on marginalized groups (such as people with disabilities and racial/ethnic minorities) can offer useful insights on the impact of increasingly common discourse across the political spectrum. We propose to collect, analyze, and disseminate data about whether and how social constructions of PWD are at play in public attitudes about resource allocation. We draw upon research in political science and psychology to answer the following questions: 1) Under what conditions does the public see PWD as deserving or undeserving of life-saving, pandemic-related health resources (ventilators and vaccines) and educational resources? 2) How do multiple marginalized identities shape perceptions of who should get scarce resources? 3) When do targets’ individual behavior become a moderating factor in the relationship between group identities and perceptions of deservingness for medical and educational resources? 4) How do individuals respond to different moral arguments, particularly those emphasizing distributional impacts on people with disabilities and racial/ethnic minorities, when making choices regarding maximizing equity vs. efficiency in the allocation of public funds between disease prevention and treatment? 5) How does the context of these choices and the public’s individual characteristics each contribute to these effects?