COVID 19 PANDEMIC: AGE DISCRIMINATION?
The European Foundation for Ethical Study and Reflection (FUNDERÉTICA), Redemptorist Foundation, in collaboration with the Department of Legal Philosophy of the Faculty of Law at the National University of Distance Education (UNED), held the 6th Meeting on Ethics and Society on November 24. Four of the speakers were Lay Missionaries of the Most Holy Redeemer.
The COVID 19 pandemic, its medical considerations, and its consequences on the way of life of the elderly centered the topics of debate in the different working groups inaugurated by Mrs. Claribel García de Castro, vice-dean of the UNED School of Law.
Following the previous editions line, the VI Meeting of Ethics and Society continued the debate on ethics and the elderly. In this 2020 edition, the incidence of the coronavirus COVID 19 pandemic on the quality of life, health, and life expectancy of the elderly was proposed as an object of analysis.
The panel “Medicine in front of the pandemic” had the participation of Mr. Antonio Fuertes Ruiz de Urbina, microbiologist and Secretary of Funderética, who presented the paper “An indomitable virus? An intervention marked by great medical information and undoubtedly in a positive key “…I have hope, and I sincerely believe that we are better; I think that the population is behaving better and the health pressure is less”.
For his part, Mr. Fernando Bandrés Moya, Professor of Legal Medicine at the Complutense University of Madrid, provided us with a critical reflection on the saturation of the health system caused by the pandemic, with statements such as “… health, health are fundamental values of the individual and cannot be subject to ideological sectarianism… we live in times of great intellectual confusion”.
The intervention of Mr. José Luis Pareja Rivas, Anthropologist and Director of the Residential Center for the Elderly Nuestra Señora del Perpetuo Socorro (Santa Fe Granada) will open the second panel: “The elderly are discriminated against” and in which he analyzed the management of the pandemic carried out from the residential centers for the elderly, an intervention marked by the vindication from the experience of the pandemic in the first line “…not only are these bioethical principles, what about the dignity of the elderly? What about their diversity? What about the integrity of the elderly?
For her part, Ms. Ana Maria Marcos del Cano, Professor of Philosophy of Law UNED, reflected on the end of life in the scenario of the pandemic “… in April we were already living a “war medicine” in which there was no uniformity of criteria, some recommendations discriminated by age, others by social value, thus violating the most basic rights …”.
The session was closed by the panel D Francisco Javier de la Torre Díaz, Professor of Moral Theology and Bioethics at the Pontifical University of Comillas, who reflected on loneliness “…we must cultivate trust, hope, the key is to return to the essential… Together with Mr. Rafael Junquera de Estéfani, Professor of Philosophy of Law at the UNED and President of Funderética, he presented a new issue of the collection Cuadernos de Ética en Clave Cotidiana “Los confinados: manual de resistencia para salir fortalados tras el COVID 19”.
The meeting ended with the projection of a video of the program for older people, “Cantando Emociones” of the FADE Foundation.
You can see the different interventions of the VI Meeting of Ethics and Society at https://fundereticaorg/conetica/.
