Biblical antecedents of modern agenda-setting: religious platforms in lieu of mass media

Can a primitive society set a public agenda? Are there some advantages for a religious society in setting an agenda? From a critical study of the communicative perspective of the Bible and hermeneutic reading of its texts, it can be said that certain elements in primitive societies succeeded in influencing the political and social agendas. They did so by exploiting specific public assemblies or appearing in crowded places in attempts to impact local and national agendas. This notion is significant because it suggests that in countries that do not have developed communication infrastructures or established religious institutions (e.g., churches, mosques, and synagogues) that serve as public arenas, indeed even in seemingly closed religious communities, there may well be attempts to use venues other than mass media to influence the public agenda

Priority of Vaccination of the Population against COVID-19: Moral Principles

The COVID-19 pandemic broke out at the end of 2019 and throughout 2020 there were intensive international efforts to find a vaccine for the disease, which has already led to the deaths of over 6 million people. In December 2020, several pharmaceutical companies announced that they had succeeded in producing an effective vaccine and after approval by the various regulatory bodies, countries started to vaccinate their citizens. With the start of the global campaign to vaccinate the world’s population against COVID-19, there was a strong renewal of the debate about prioritizing the population for the vaccination. This article presents the moral approaches to this issue and their consequences

Religious Community and Communal Religiosity: Foundations at the Beginning of the 21st Century

Robert Putnam observed that more people than ever go bowling, but fewer than ever do so as parts of teams, a phenomenon that he named “Bowling Alone [...

Should Pharma Companies Waive Their COVID-19 Vaccine Patents? A Legal and Ethical Appraisal

Pharmaceutical companies, like many other types of companies, are incentivized to create, manufacture, and distribute new products, in part due to the legal protections of patent law. However, the tension between patent rights and the public good has been heightened as pharma companies developed new vaccines to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Wealthy governments paid well for vaccines and received ample supplies, while low- and middle-income countries struggled to obtain access to any vaccines. Some countries called for pharmaceutical companies to waive their patent protections for vaccines in order to facilitate the worldwide manufacture and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. This paper will examine the rationale of patent protection and patent waiver issues, then compare these concepts with ethical constructs and a Jewish perspective