Prioritize without discrimination: The Spanish Bioethics Committee opinion on the rights of people with disabilities in a pandemic context

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has revived the old debate about the prioritization of health resources, emerging what can be perfectly branded as a bioethical crisis within the health crisis, as a consequence of the prioritization recommendations adopted by some scientific societies, in Spain and abroad, who discriminate on the basis of age or disability. In the framework of this «bioethical crisis», the Spanish Bioethics Committee issued a Report which enshrines a doctrine on prioritization based on equity and attention to vulnerability, which departs from utilitarian criteria and, in particular, from the criterion of the social value of the person. One of the bases of this alternative prioritization criterion is the recognition of the equal dignity and rights of people with disabilities, an issue to which the CBE has devoted singular attention in the last five years.