Society or population, social diversity. Flat cartoon vector illustration.

Engendering Equity in Biomedical Research by Meeting Communities Where They Are

By Rachele Hendricks-Sturrup

To address the root of both health disparities and community underrepresentation in biomedical research, it is mission-critical to teach early-stage career researchers how to empower underrepresented communities as partners in research while respecting and appreciating local history, context, and values.

As a researcher, I often encounter empirical studies in the literature that explore and experiment with institutionally– (versus community-) derived interventions that are meant to help boost underrepresented community engagement in biomedical research.

What if researchers took more time to intentionally harness their power and training to elevate, empower, and mobilize the voices of the communities they study to help design more impactful engagement interventions?

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Cannabis in clear glass jars.

The Biden Administration Should Resolve Cannabis Regulation Chaos

By Troy Sims

The Biden Administration has the opportunity to be the first administration to rid our legal system of cannabis regulation chaos.

State laws governing medical or recreational cannabis conflict with federal regulations, leaving cannabis consumers, businesses, and the lawyers representing them caught in the middle.

Guidance documents from the Department of Justice (DOJ) are an often-overlooked source of complexity and confusion in the cannabis industry. The Biden administration should seek to reconcile state and federal cannabis law.

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Bill of Health - Globe and vaccine, covid vaccine

Access-to-Medicines Activists Demand Health Justice During COVID-19 Pandemic

By Brook K. Baker 

It was apparent from the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic that a business-as-usual approach — perpetuating the biopharmaceutical industry’s intellectual property-based monopolies and allowing artificial supply scarcity and nationalistic hoarding by rich countries — would result in systemic failure and gross inequity.

The world had seen it all before, from the Big Pharma blockade of affordable antiretrovirals to treat HIV/AIDS, to the hoarding of vaccines by the global north during the H1N1 bird flu outbreak in 2009 and its stockpiling of Tamiflu.

Activists in the access-to-medicines movement quickly mobilized to combat the threat of vaccine/therapeutic apartheid.

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illustration of person tracking his health condition with smart bracelet, mobile application and cloud services.

Reforming How Medicare Pays for Digital Health

By Robert Horne and Lucia Savage

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, also known as the digital revolution, leverages technology to blur the lines between products and services. In the health insurance sector, this revolution offers policymakers unique opportunities to improve coverage and payment efficiencies while providing meaningful benefits to beneficiaries.

Medicare could lead this charge. Congress has an opportunity to reform Medicare in 2024, when the Trust Fund will become insolvent. Policymakers expect Congress to address this problem legislatively to prevent interruptions in coverage for seniors.

If past behavior is any indication, the legislation will also include reforms to improve how the program operates and spends money. Reforms to Medicare’s traditional coverage and reimbursement approaches that harness the digital revolution can help the program secure additional value. We know this because other sectors of the U.S. economy that have fully embraced this revolution have realized additional value.

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Blue house in grass field.

Community-Based Response to Intimate Partner Violence During COVID-19 Pandemic

By Leigh Goodmark

Intimate partner violence has been called “a pandemic within the pandemic.”

A study of fourteen American cities found that the number of domestic violence calls to law enforcement rose 9.7% in March and April 2020, compared to the previous year. A hospital-based study spanning the same time period found significant increases in the number of people treated for injuries related to intimate partner violence. And a 2021 review of 18 studies relying on data from police, domestic violence hotlines, and health care providers found that reports of intimate partner violence increased 8% after lockdown orders were imposed.

Although almost half of people subjected to abuse never call the state for assistance, our responses to intimate partner violence are largely embedded within the state and rely heavily on law enforcement. A disproportionate amount of funding under the Violence Against Women Act — by one estimate, 85% — is directed to the criminal legal system. A growing number of activists skeptical of state intervention are arguing that responses beyond the carceral state are essential.

The pandemic showed that community-based supports, like pod mapping, mutual aid, and community accountability, originally developed by activists critical of law enforcement responses to violence, can foster safety and accountability without requiring state intervention. The pandemic could spur advocates seeking to distance themselves from state-based responses to expand their services.

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Medical staff work in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) for COVID-19 patients in University Hospital of Liege in Belgium on May 5th, 2020.

The Legality of Pandemic Detection and Prevention Technology

*This article is adapted from a longer paper published in the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform. To access the original paper, please click here.

By April Xiaoyi Xu  

A test-and-isolate system for detecting and monitoring new pathogens could avert future pandemics, but may face legal challenges in implementation.

The test-and-isolate model is described in a 2020 Scientific American article by biochemist David Ecker. Ecker recommends strategically placing modern, high-speed metagenomic sequencing technology in urban hospitals across the United States to flag previously-unknown pathogens before the infectious agents have the opportunity to spread widely and potentially start a new pandemic.

Under this model, during a time period without any apparent pandemics, the 200 biggest metropolitan hospitals in the U.S. would automatically run diagnostic tests up-front for novel causative agents among patients who visit the emergency room with severe respiratory symptoms that are possibly infectious. If such a system detects a sufficiently serious pathogen, public health agencies will send out diagnostic tests to all residents in the affected geographical area(s) within weeks and isolate those who test positive. This system also will be integrated with contact tracing and more standard outbreak response.

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Police car.

Blurring the Line Between Public Health and Public Safety

By Jocelyn Simonson

Collective movement struggles during the twin crises of COVID-19 and the 2020 uprisings have helped blur the concepts of public safety and public health.

These movements have shown how all of our public health and all of our public safety suffers when we use the police, prosecution, and prisons to solve our collective problems. Their collective resistance to the status quo underscores how these terms — public health and public safety — too often carry with them an exclusionary understanding of which “public” matters.

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Top view of white cubicles in modern office with white walls and carpeted floor. 3d rendering.

Challenges Faced by Employees with Disabilities amid the Return to In-Person Work

By Doron Dorfman

Over a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, many employers are calling workers who had been fulfilling their roles remotely back into the office.

In May 2021, for example, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase told employees that by July, they were expected to come back into their offices for at least a few days a week, adding that remote work “just doesn’t work for those who want to hustle. It doesn’t work for spontaneous idea generation. It doesn’t work for culture.” In July 2021, Apple announced its plan to require employees to be in the office at least three days a week.

These calls for getting back to the office raise particular quandaries for employees with disabilities, many of whom have disproportionally borne the brunt of pandemic layoffs.

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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.

Social Distancing, Social Protest, and the Social Constitution of a New Body of Law

By Lindsay F. Wiley

COVID-19 mitigation orders, court decisions adjudicating challenges to them, and legislation adopted to constrain similar orders in the future are constituting a new body of law governing social distancing.

The emerging law of social distancing is vital to the future of public health. It also offers more general lessons about how law interacts with individual behavior, social norms, and social contestation of what we owe each other as members of a community.

Social protests — including massive protests for racial justice and against police violence as well as much smaller anti-lockdown protests — are playing an important role in these developments.

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