Whose burden, whose benefit? Revisiting ethical trade-offs in the WHO guidelines on scaling up mass azithromycin administration

Author summary: New evidence suggests that mass drug administration of azithromycin (MDAA) can significantly reduce childhood mortality in high-burden, low-resource settings, yet the World Health Organization’s (WHO) 2020 guidelines take a cautious approach due to concerns about antimicrobial resistance (AMR).While the WHO guidelines cite ethical principles, they insufficiently address key considerations, such as intergenerational justice, equitable burden sharing, and the structural determinants of health that shape infectious disease vulnerability.Global AMR policy often prioritizes conservation over access in ways that disproportionately burden low-income countries, despite high-income countries also bearing significant responsibility for the emergence and spread of AMR.A balanced ethical framework is needed: one that explicitly integrates contextual values, including justice across generations, historical inequities, and community input under uncertainty.Revised WHO guidelines that expand eligibility for MDAA based on context-specific criteria, establish thresholds for mortality and resistance monitoring, and encourage global investment in sustainable health systems and antibiotic access, may better align with the WHO’s own principles on equity, human rights, and social determinants of health in the development of guidelines. This Policy Forum article by Maple Goh and colleagues calls for greater consideration of ethical trade-offs relating to conservation and access of antibiotics in the WHO guidelines for mass drug administration of azithromycin.