Ethical and human rights considerations in public health in low and middle-income countries: an assessment using the case of Uganda’s responses to COVID-19 pandemic

This paper formulates ethics and human rights criteria for evaluating public health measures and uses it to reflect on the ethical propriety of those adopted by the government of Uganda to contain the spread of COVID-19. The study found that some of the measures adopted violate ethics and human rights principles. The authors argue that even though some human rights can sometimes be legitimately derogated and limited to meet public health goals during public health emergencies, measures that infringe on human rights should satisfy certain ethics and human rights criteria including being effective, strictly necessary, proportionate to the magnitude of the threat, reasonable in the circumstances, equitable, and least restrictive.