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Introduction: Public health ethics addresses moral dilemmas arising from balancing individual healthcare needs with societal interests. Ethical considerations in public health during pandemics and disasters aim to reduce mortality rates and minimize social injustice through fair principles. Objective: This paper analyzes public health ethics and ethical values in allocating resources during mass casualty incidents. The intersection of public health ethics, applied bioethics, and ethics of social consequences (through non-utilitarian consequentialism) guides addressing serious public health challenges in catastrophic scenarios. The application of the given interaction is significant for professional medical ethics. Methodology: The paper employs inductive, deductive, and normative methods of bioethics and the methodology of ethics of social consequences. Conclusion: The paradigmatic disparity between the bioethics of pandemics and disaster bioethics lies in the fluid application of bioethical principles and the accentuation of utilitarian demands depending on the severity and scale of mass casualty incidents. Applied bioethics in crisis situations respects the approaches of public health ethics and attempts to increase positive social outcomes. The application of (scarce) resource allocation criteria and triage of patients is derived from ethical decisions beneficial to public health and lege artis approaches of medical bioethics. The paper presents professional and ethical criteria for medically inappropriate treatment within the framework of patient triage; we approach crisis ethics from the perspective of maximization of benefit. Age is not an exclusion criterion of acute healthcare provision in crisis situations. Ethics of social consequences as a form of non-utilitarian consequentialism allowing for social consequences bridges public health ethics and applied bioethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2020, COVID-19 patients overwhelmed hospital beds in several Spanish cities, producing an increase in mortality derived from a lack of resources. The provision of new spaces to be reconfigured as healthcare centers for COVID patients was one of the measures implemented. In Madrid, two of these COVID centers drew enormous media and political repercussions due to their high cost and the controversy surrounding the quality of the care they offered. In this scenario of misinformation, several doctors and patients rejected to be transferred to such medical centers, but they were nonetheless compelled to make the move. This manuscript underscores how this lack of transparency affects health workers, patients, and the relationship between them, and brings out the question of how many essential bioethical principles can be individually violated by a matter of public health. New guidelines for the transfer of patients should be designed from an ethical perspective and updated, as the epidemic continues, to improve the modern understanding of human factors in times of uncertainty. The lesson that these centers provide us is that we must rethink crisis resource management from a new perspective that prioritizes access to quality information. In its absence, the principle of autonomy must prevail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]