The Ethics of Public Health Communication During Disease Outbreaks: Lessons from COVID-19 for Nigerian Health Professionals

This study examines the ethical dimensions of public health communication during disease outbreaks, drawing lessons from the Nigerian government's COVID-19 communication experience for health professionals across the South West and North Central geopolitical zones. Public health communication during emergencies raises philosophical questions about the ethics of paternalism, the limits of public authority to restrict information and mandate behaviour, and the communicative obligations of health agencies to truthfulness and transparency. Using a professional practice design, the study draws on public health ethics from Norman Daniels, Nuffield Council bioethics frameworks on public health intervention, and African communitarian health ethics, supplemented by secondary literature published between 2020 and 2024. Structured interviews with 20 public health physicians, risk communication specialists, and philosophy academics in Lagos and Abuja provide the primary data. Documentary analysis of NCDC COVID-19 communication materials from 2020 to 2022 provides the case material. Findings reveal that Nigerian COVID-19 public health communication adopted paternalistic messaging strategies that prioritised compliance over transparent risk communication, generating distrust that undermined long-term public health cooperation. The study argues that a communicative ethics framework grounded in Habermasian discourse ethics would have produced more effective and more ethical public health messaging. Keywords: public health ethics, COVID-19, health communication, paternalism, Nigeria.