Washington DC, USA - FEBRUARY 10 2021: President Joe Biden delivers remarks to Department of Defense personnel, with Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III.

4 Years into the COVID-19 Pandemic: Where We Stand

By Jennifer S. Bard

The White House is preparing to shut down their COVID Task Force this May, in conjunction with ending the public health emergency — the latest in a series of astounding and shortsighted decisions that put individual Americans at as great a risk from serious harm as a result of catching COVID-19 as at any stage in the pandemic.

By declaring the pandemic over by fiat, the government is giving up the fight when they should be redoubling their efforts. Not only is COVID still very much with us, but all existing methods of preventing infection have either been severely weakened by the virus’ mutations, or simply abandoned. Additionally, more is known of the harm COVID causes past the initial infection.

There is nothing vague or subtle about the “end” of a disease outbreak. Either cases actually disappear, as with seasonal influenza, or they are dramatically reduced through a vaccine that prevents further transmission, as happened with measles and polio. Neither event has happened here. Instead, like HIV, which continues to be an ongoing public health emergency, the virus continues to infect and mutate.

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President Joe Biden at desk in Oval Office.

Federalizing Public Health

By Elizabeth Weeks

The most promising path forward in public health is to continue recognizing federal authority and responsibility in this space. I carefully choose “recognizing,” rather than “expanding” or “moving” because it is critical to the argument that federal authority for public health already exists within the federalist structure and that employing federal authority to address public health problems does not represent a dimunition of state authority. Rather than a pie, of which pieces consumed at the federal level necessarily reduce pieces consumable at the state level, we should envision the relationship as a Venn diagram, where increasing overlap strengthens authority for promoting and protecting public health broadly.

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Lawyer working with agreement in office. man signing hand writing pen attorney concept.

Strategic Maneuvers in Response to COVID-19 Denialist Laws and Policies

By James G. Hodge, Jr.

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, now entering its fourth year in 2023, legislators, executives, and judges at every level of government have sought measures to derail efficacious public health interventions. Despite clear risks of excess morbidity and mortality, these law- and policy-makers, often in more conservative jurisdictions, intentionally chose to push laws, guidance, and decisions prioritizing rapid “returns to normalcy” over the health and lives of Americans.

Casual observers of these collective trends may see the end of public health powers and services as we know them in the United States. And that’s where they are wrong.

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New York NY USA-August 17, 2021 Businesses in Chelsea in New York display signs requiring proof of vaccination prior to entering.

Employers and the Future of Public Health

By Sharona Hoffman

As state and federal public health authority erodes, employers may increasingly find themselves playing a central role in promoting public health. For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many employers either incentivized or required employees and customers to be vaccinated and/or masked even in the absence of federal and state mandates. In the future, they may frequently take the lead in implementing public health measures.

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Los Angeles, California / USA - May 1, 2020: People in front of Los Angeles’ City Hall protest the state’s COVID-19 stay at home orders in a “Fully Open California” protest.

The Supreme Court Threatens to Undermine Vaccination Decisions Entrusted to the States

By Donna Gitter

In 2021, the Supreme Court articulated in Tandon v. Newsom a legal principle that threatens to upend over a century of legal precedent recognizing the authority of state governments to ensure public health by mandating vaccines.

The ruling lays the groundwork for courts to force states to include religious exemptions to mandatory vaccines whenever they include secular exemptions, such as medical ones.

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Lawyer and client in courtroom.

Liability for COVID-19 Vaccine Harms: We Need to Do Better

By Dorit Reiss

COVID-19 vaccines are extremely safe, and serious harms are rare. But rare does not mean the risk is zero; thus, we need a way to determine which people have plausible claims of harm from the vaccines, and we must then compensate them quickly and generously. However, the regular torts system is not a good option for adjudicating these claims. Fortunately, we already have a better system — no-fault compensation — available to address the problem.

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Airplane taking off from the airport.

In-Flight COVID Transmission: Surveying the Liability Landscape

By Christopher Robertson

Do airlines have legal obligations to manage the risk of in-flight infections?

In the pre-COVID era, I answered this question affirmatively. In a 2016 paper, I reviewed the scientific literature showing that airline travel is a key vector for spreading infectious disease, both because airports and airplanes tend to mix people in such close quarters that they are likely to infect each other, and because it efficiently distributes infected people around the world to then infect more people.

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3d render, abstract fantasy cloudscape on a sunny day, white clouds fly under the red gates on the blue sky. Square portal construction.

A Different Future Was Possible: Reflections on the US Pandemic Response

By Justin Feldman

The inadequacies of the early U.S. pandemic response are well-rehearsed at this point — the failure to develop tests, distribute personal protective equipment, recommend masks for the general public, protect essential workers, and take swift action to stop the spread.

But to focus on these failures risks forgetting the collective framing and collective policy response that dominated the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic. And forgetting that makes it seem as though our current, enormous death toll was inevitable. This dangerously obscures what went wrong and limits our political imagination for the future of the COVID-19 pandemic and other emerging crises.

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Vial and syringe.

Can Children Consent to the COVID Vaccine? The Case of Foster Care and Juvenile Justice

By Victoria Kalumbi

Despite pediatric COVID-19 vaccine availability, many youth remain unvaccinated, and are thus at higher risk of life-altering outcomes as a result of contracting COVID-19.[1]

Some children may be unvaccinated by no choice of their own, but instead because of decisions made by parents, guardians, or state or local government officials.

In this post, I argue that young people should have the opportunity to consent to vaccines. I focus on the specific case of children in foster care and the juvenile justice system, as they are particularly vulnerable amid the ongoing pandemic. However, the legal and political avenues explored in this piece to ensure that young people have a stake in their health and vaccine status are broadly generalizable to all children.

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