Global eradication of a disease, if successful, is a way of providing an enormous health benefit that stretches far into the future. There is no need to reach for the idea that there is a special duty to eradicate disease; the same considerations that are in play in ordinary public health policy – of reducing the burden of disease equitably and efficiently – suffice to make global disease eradication a compelling goal where doing so is feasible. Eradication is often thought to have an important symbolic value. The tangible goal of eradicating polio has energised donors – such as members of the Rotary Club – for many years.

Margaret Chan, the Director General of the WHO, put it thus in a speech to the Rotary International Convention in 2008, ‘We have to prove the power of public health. The international community has so very few opportunities to improve this world in genuine and lasting ways. Polio eradication find more is one’ [11]. It is sometimes argued that this symbolic value makes eradication an

ethically special case – and hence that eradication policies should be pursued over and above the actual health benefits they provide. Certainly, as we explore in more detail later, eradication policies need to stay the course, and large-scale success stories like smallpox help to make the goal seem achievable. But this is merely to say that eradication requires a firm long-term commitment if it is to be successful, rather than to take Selleck Forskolin the symbolic value of eradication to be a reason to undertake such a policy in the first place. The symbolic value of eradication does not create ethical duties by itself. Even if it is agreed that eradication has a high symbolic value for many individuals, this does not provide a reason for thinking that anyone has an additional ethical duty to facilitate eradication others campaigns by agreeing to

be vaccinated, or that governments have an additional permission to do things that would otherwise constitute a violation of someone’s rights, such as enforcing vaccination. If the person to be vaccinated agrees that disease eradication has high symbolic value, then it seems plausible to suppose that she would be willing to take the steps necessary in her own conduct to facilitate disease eradication, and to allow others to interfere with her life for this purpose. But the operative moral principle here is informed consent, and the symbolic value of eradication plays only a derivative role. If someone does not think that disease eradication has an important symbolic value, it is difficult to see how the fact that it had symbolic reason for others could either generate a moral duty for her to subject herself to risk, or a permission for others to coerce her in order to preserve this symbolic value. When symbolic values are weighed in the balance against things that have intrinsic value, then the merely symbolically valuable must give way.