Tag: Connecticut

police cars lined up.

Policing Public Health: Carceral-Logic Lessons from a Mid-Size City

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Zain Lakhani, Alice Miller, Kayla Thomas, with Anna Wherry

When it comes to public health intervention in a contagion, policing remains a primary enforcement tool. And where a health state is intertwined with carceral logics, enforcement becomes coercive; emphasis is placed on the control of movement and behavior, rather than on support and care.

Our experience in New Haven during the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic well illuminates this, while also revealing a logic of exceptional force lying dormant in municipal health practices.

Attending to the local is all the more important, albeit difficult, for fast moving and intensely quotidian practices, as COVID in the U.S. seems to be settling in as a pandemic of the local.

Our experience as activist-scholars working with a New Haven-based sex worker-led harm-reduction service and advocacy group, SWAN, suggests that by focusing on municipal practices, we can better understand what public health police power actually is. By orienting our scholarship toward the way social movements engage with local politics, we can then address how these police powers complicate the ability of those most at risk of both disease exposure and police abuse to engage with local authorities. Absent this engagement and critique, progressive policies for constructive state public health powers may be more vulnerable to attack from the right.

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Close up of a Doctor making a vaccination in the shoulder of patient.

The Legality and Feasibility of COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates for Children

Dorit Reiss 1 Comment

By Dorit Rubinstein Reiss

On May 10, 2021 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) expanded its Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine to include children aged 12-15.

The vaccine was previously authorized for use in those aged 16 and older. The company has announced it will seek emergency use authorization for younger children by September.

Now that children over the age of 12 can get vaccinated against COVID-19, will immunization against SARS-CoV-2 become a requirement for the return to public schools this fall?

My answer: In the near term, we probably will not see COVID-19 vaccine mandates for school children. And in the longer term, it depends.

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Empty classroom.

The National Anti-Vaccine Movement Heads to Hartford to Intimidate CT Legislators

Dorit Reiss Leave a comment

By Arthur Caplan and Dorit Rubinstein Reiss

As Connecticut’s Senate prepares to vote tomorrow on whether to repeal Connecticut’s religious exemption from school immunization mandates, out-of-state anti-vaccine activists are mobilizing to threaten and intimidate legislators to vote against the bill.

The legislators should hold firm, and pass the bill the Governor says he will sign. They must not let aggressive attackers stop them from acting to make Connecticut’s children safer. Legislators should show the out-of-state anti-vaccine movement that intimidation doesn’t work here.

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Hospitals’ Exposure to Products Liability Suits

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By Alex Stein

The United States District Court for the District of Connecticut has recently delivered an important decision that opens up new possibilities for suing hospitals and clinics. This decision allowed a patient alleging that hospital employees injected her with a contaminated medication to sue the hospital in products liability. Gallinari v. Kloth, — F.Supp.3d —- (U.S.D.C. D.Conn. 2015), 2015 WL 7758835. Read More

Medical Malpractice and the Middle-Ground Fallacy: Should Victims’ Families Recover Compensation for Emotional Harm?

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By Alex Stein

Medical malpractice victims are generally entitled to recover compensation for emotional harm they endure: see, e.g., Alexander v. Scheid, 726 N.E.2d 272, 283–84 (Ind. 2000). But what about a victim’s close family member? Take a person who suffers emotional distress from witnessing a medical mistreatment and the consequent injury or demise of her loved one. Should the court obligate the negligent physician or hospital to compensate that person for her emotional harm?

This question has no uniform answer under our medical malpractice laws. Some states allow victims’ families to recover compensation for their emotional harm, while others do not. Three weeks ago, the Connecticut Supreme Court struck a middle ground between these two extremes. Squeo v. Norwalk Hosp. Ass’n, 316 Conn. 558, — A.3d —- (Conn. 2015). Read More

Medical Malpractice and the “Continuous Act” Exceptions to the Statute of Repose

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By Alex Stein

Cefaratti v. Aranow, — A.3d —- (Conn.App. 2014) is a textbook decision on the “continuous act” exceptions to the statute of repose. This decision of the Connecticut Appeals Court draws an important – but oft-missed – distinction between “continuous wrong” and “continuous treatment.”

Back in 2003, the plaintiff underwent open gastric bypass surgery in an attempt to cure her morbid obesity. Her follow-up treatment and monitoring took place between 2004 and the summer of 2009. All these procedures have been carried out by the same surgeon, the defendant, at a hospital in which he had attending privileges as an independent contractor.

The plaintiff testified at her deposition that on each of her post-operative visits, she told the defendant that she was experiencing abdominal pain. In August 2009, after being diagnosed with breast cancer by another physician, the plaintiff had a CT scan of her chest, abdomen, and pelvis, which revealed the presence of a foreign object in her abdominal cavity. This object was a surgical sponge that the defendant negligently left when he operated the plaintiff in 2003. Following that discovery, the plaintiff filed a malpractice suit against the defendant. Read More