Abstract

Infectious diseases such as Ebola, severe acute respiratory syndrome, avian influenza and the most recent COVID-19 continue to emerge, evolve, and kill significant numbers of people and frighten and threaten many more. Infectious diseases entail some unique ethical features that are often encountered by public health officials. Public health measures used to control them sometimes involve infringement of widely accepted individual rights and liberties, infectious diseases raise difficult philosophical questions about how to strike and balance between the goal of protecting the greater good of public health and the goal of protecting individual rights and liberties. This paper should like to advance three theses: first, that political thought depends on ethics; second, that the kind of ethics that provides its firmest basis is an ethics that emphasis is laid on importance of the society rather than centrality of the individual; and third, that conformity to this ethics would make a large impact in order to strengthen the pandemic preparedness for Public Health Emergencies in the Philippines. This paper asserts the importance of strengthening mechanisms and policies to healthcare in the Philippines which addresses the burden of combating infectious diseases such as COVID-19. The primary focus of this paper is not on the existence of injustice on a national scale but on its implications for those who have power to act within the legislative body, including governments research councils, private companies and researchers.