A comparative analysis of the ethical weight assigned to individual rights and collective good in the context of the COVID-19 response by socialist and democratic nations

The field of global health and its work is generally conceived of in terms of a human rights framework, rooted in the United Nations 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. Few dispute the human rights framework's strong commitment to individual rights; however, individual rights are sometimes defended at the expense of a collective right to public health. In the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries are facing challenging decisions with regards to the balance between individual freedom and public health. Countries are each approaching the pandemic differently, responding to the individual rights and collective good calculus in varying ways. I seek to understand the relationship between a political context and the weight given to individual rights and collective good – and how that weighing shapes and is shaped by public health crises. To understand this relationship, I propose to study the response to and outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic in the socialist (collective-minded) context of Cuba and the democratic liberal (individual-minded) context of Canada. A qualitative content analysis of news sources in Canada and Cuba will be conducted to identify the countries' relative weighing of individual rights and collective good during a public health crisis. The outcomes of this analysis will be used to answer the research question: how do the respective political structures of Cuba and Canada, specifically the ethical weight of individual rights and collective good, affect their responses to COVID-19 and public health outcomes? This work will contribute both to the ongoing conversations on the COVID-19 response, as well as the broader conversations on how the work of global health orientates itself to the balancing of individual and collective good.