“Lives versus livelihoods”: Conflict and coherence between policy objectives in the COVID-19 pandemic

Many policies were put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States to manage the negative impact of the coronavirus. Limiting severe illness and death was one important objective of these policies, but it is widely acknowledged by public health ethicists that pandemic policies needed to consider other factors. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 38 people across 17 states who participated in the state-level COVID-19 pandemic policy process, we examine how those actors recounted their engagement with four different objectives over the course of the pandemic: protecting public health with respect to COVID-19 (which we refer to as pathogen-focused disease prevention), protecting the economy, promoting the public's broader health and wellbeing, and preserving and restoring individual freedoms. We describe the different ways that pathogen-focused disease prevention was thought to have conflicted with, or to have been coherent with, the other three policy objectives over the course of the pandemic. In tracing the shifting relationships between objectives, we highlight four reasons put forward by the participants for why policy changes occurred throughout the pandemic: a change on the part of decisionmaker(s) regarding the perceived acceptability of the negative effects of a policy on one or more policy objectives; a change in the epistemic context; a change in the 'tools in the toolbox'; and a change in the public's attitudes that affected the feasibility of a policy. We conclude by considering the ethical implications of the shifting relationships that were described between objectives over the course of the pandemic.