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During the early COVID-19 pandemic, citizens of the United States were asked to comply with strictnonpharmaceutical public health recommendations to stop the spread of the virus. As the response evolved,resistance to these recommendations began to emerge along moral and ethical lines. While a growing body ofpost-pandemic research examines moral associations with public health compliance, no studies have examinedthe ethical orientations that existed prior to large-scale politicization of the pandemic response. This study is across-sectional secondary analysis of a convenience sample (N=110) collected in March 2020, before maskmandates and widespread political polarization of the public health response. Participants completed Forsyth's(1980) Ethics Position Questionnaire and indicated agreement or disagreement with six nonpharmaceuticalpublic health recommendations. Analysis was triangulated using Pearson's correlation, independent samples ttest, and one-way ANOVA. Findings reveal a "Golden Hour" of broad consensus with collective public healthrecommendations during the early pandemic, with no statistically significant differences across Forsyth's (1980)four ethical taxonomies. Exploratory trends that did not survive Bonferroni correction suggest an associationbetween idealism and disagreement with the recommendation that senior citizens stay home, and betweenrelativism and agreement that those with serious underlying health conditions should stay home. These findingssuggest that collective public health recommendations can achieve high levels of compliance through uniformmessaging; however, targeted, individualized recommendations require ethically segmented communicationstrategies. The Ethical Activation Messaging Model (EAMM) is proposed as a theoretical framework to guidefuture research and public health communication practice.