The Ethics of Vaccine Mandates and Vaccine Refusals

September 11, 2024
Noon – 1 p.m., Zoom

Bioethics Grand Rounds are sponsored by the Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine Certificate Program in Medical Ethics, offered in collaboration with the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Regional Ethics program.

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Speaker: Laine Ross MD, PhD
Dean’s Professor and Inaugural Chair of the Department of Health Humanities and Bioethics, and the Director of the Paul M Schyve, MD Center for Bioethics at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry

Lainie Friedman Ross, MD, PhD, a pediatrician and philosopher, is the Dean’s Professor and Inaugural Chair of the Department of Health Humanities and Bioethics, and the Director of the Paul M Schyve, MD Center for Bioethics at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry where she also holds secondary appointments in the Departments of Pediatrics and Philosophy. Prior to joining the University of Rochester in 2023, Dr. Ross spent 28 years at the University of Chicago where she was the Carolyn and Matthew Bucksbaum Professor of Clinical Ethics, Professor in the Departments of Pediatrics, Medicine, Surgery and The College, co-director of the Institute for Translational Medicine, and Associate Director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics.

Dr Ross’ research portfolio addresses ethical and policy issues in organ and tissue transplantation, pediatrics, genetics, research ethics, and health care disparities. In transplantation, she and colleagues proposed the idea of kidney paired exchanges between incompatible donor-recipient pairs which then evolved into kidney chains and now accounts for over 1000 lives saved annually. She co-authored a textbook on living donor organ transplantation (with Dick Thistlethwaite) and 2 textbooks, one on deceased donor organ transplantation and one on defining death (with Bob Veatch).

Dr. Ross is a graduate of Princeton University (AB from the School of Public and International Affairs), University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine (MD) and Yale University (MPhil and PhD in Philosophy). She trained in pediatrics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of New York-Presbyterian. She is a Fellow of the Hastings Center, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Medicine.