Tournament: NSD | Round: 4 | Opponent: TraRob Ali Ahmad | Judge: Ben Waldman
CP Text: ~actor~ ought to recognize the right of workers to strike except for healthcare workers during a public health emergency.
The counterplan is key to pandemic containment
Damery et al 10 S Damery, H Draper, S Wilson, S Greenfield, J Ives, J Parry, J Petts and T Sorell, Journal of Medical Ethics Vol. 36, No. 1 (January 2010), pp. 12-18 (7 pages), "Healthcare workers' perceptions of the duty to work during an influenza pandemic on JSTOR," https://www.jstor.org/stable/20696709~~#metadata_info_tab_contents
The duty to work is presently under scrutiny because of the current swine flu pandemic. Pandemic influenza is, according to the National Risk Register, the potential emergency that is likely to have the greatest impact in the UK,6 and the serious nature of the threat is widely recognised internationally.710 Health services in the UK are already strained, and the situation is set to worsen as winter?the traditional influenza season? approaches. HCWs are at the forefront of both pandemic response and exposure to infection. An effective public health response that ensures that appropriate standards of conventional and critical patient care can be maintained depends on the majority of uninfected HCWs continuing to attend work, despite the risks they might face in doing so. We recently published research suggesting that absenteeism during an influenza pandemic may be significant, depending on the severity of the pandemic and the combination of adverse circum stances that arise as a result.11 In common with others, we have found that there are barriers to both the willingness and the ability to work.11-15 Pandemic preparedness plans typically focus on reducing barriers to ability (such as employers providing HCWs with transport to and from work if they are redeployed to an alternative site, or allowing greater flexibility of working hours).16 These plans assume that ability and willingness are discrete and complementary, such that addressing barriers to ability to work will have a corresponding positive influence on will ingness to do so. However, willingness may not necessarily be increased by the implementation of practical or pragmatic solutions but may be instead more deeply rooted in a number of factors, such as the extent to which HCWs feel included in preparedness planning, or various sociodemo graphic and family issues. These are likely to influence HCWs; willingness to work during a pandemic or other emergency.15 1718 The main findings of a large-scale survey of professional and non-professional HCWs in the West Midlands, which aimed to investigate the factors associated with willingness to work during an influenza pandemic, have been published elsewhere.11
Pandemics cause extinction
Millet and Snyder-Beattie 17 Piers Millett and Andrew Snyder-Beattie, Health Security Volume 15, Number 4, 2017, https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1089/hs.2017.0028
How worthwhile is it spending resources to study and mitigate the chance of human extinction
AND
still ought to invest more in preventing the most extreme possible biosecurity catastrophes.