It is easy to criticise pandemic policies in hindsight, but the more urgent question is: are we prepared for the next one?
Whether Covid-19 decisions were made in good faith to save lives is a question for the past. The real task now is to learn from those experiences and take responsibility for our future actions.
This is why debates on whether we could have “saved both lives and livelihoods”, as Health Minister Dzulkefly Ahmad suggests, or whether “democracy is not a luxury to be paused” matter so much. They highlight the conflict between utilitarianism and deontology.
In the early days of the pandemic, the choice to lock down was a forced one, driven by fear and uncertainty. Balancing health and the economy only became a viable option later, with the advent of vaccines and increased experience.
To be able to “choose both” in the future, we must prepare in advance. This means investing in social safety nets, strengthening public health systems, and building the institutional capacity to protect vulnerable populations without paralysing the entire nation.
Similarly, Dzulzefly’s call that democracy is not a luxury must be tested against Malaysia’s political reality. Historically, Parliament largely ceded power to the Executive.
Even the Speaker deferred to the Prime Minister. Oversight was minimal. Yet there were notable exceptions. The lesson here is not that democracy fails in pandemics, but that it must be deliberately designed to withstand them.
The pandemic was a moral stress test. It exposed inequities in healthcare, magnified the suffering of the marginalised, and strained the fragile covenant between citizens and the state.
The real failure was not the emergency measures themselves, but our lack of a pre-existing framework for embedding moral reasoning into decision-making.
As Donald Berwick argues, health is shaped more by “social determinants of health” such as poverty, racism, and inequality, than by medical care alone. Healthcare often acts as a “repair shop” for issues that are rooted in broader social injustice.
Berwick suggests that for true change to happen, society must embrace a sense of shared social responsibility, what he calls the “moral determinants of health”.
This requires fostering solidarity and collective action to address systemic issues like racism, housing insecurity, and flawed democratic systems.
We all have a moral imperative to drive this societal change. We can advocate for reforms, vote for change, and work to restore the social fabric that promotes health.
If we want to be ready for the next pandemic, we must learn from this one. We must transform the memory of suffering into a catalyst for reform, or we are condemned to repeat our mistakes.
Dr Erwin Khoo is an Affiliate at the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School and Head of Paediatrics Department at IMU University.
- This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of CodeBlue.
