By Katherine Macfarlane
Public health in the U.S. has collapsed. In its place, we are left with an insufficient, impoverished alternative: personal crusades. This essay describes the cost of casting aside what is best for the public’s health in favor of individual choice, especially to those who are high-risk for serious illness or death from COVID-19. It explores how they must negotiate public health measures on their own.
By Daniel Swartzman
If public health is to prosper, we will need to overcome the after-effects of several failures of imagination.
By Jennifer S. Bard
Teaching public health law over these past three years has meant contending with a series of federal and state court rulings that in different ways have called into question many of what seemed to be the most established principles of public health law. The double whammy of the pandemic and a new, and very different Supreme Court have already resulted in more dramatic changes to public health law in the past few years than in the preceding one hundred plus years.
By Aparajita Lath
Last month, the patent battle between COVID-19 mRNA vaccine manufacturers continued with BioNTech/Pfizer filing a strong defense and counter-claim to Moderna’s allegations of patent infringement.
In their initial August 2022 complaint, Moderna alleged that three of its mRNA patents were infringed by Pfizer/BioNTech. Interestingly, as of January 12, 2023, Moderna has listed 10 patents covering Spikevax (its mRNA vaccine) on its website. Since biotechnology inventions can be covered by several patents, each of which may not be easy to identify through public searches, the decision to publish a consolidated list of patents is a move in the right direction. However, the list is an evolving one, and, as it happens, one of three patents at issue, i.e., patent no. 10,933,127 (‘127) has not been listed.
The following article explains the key patents at stake in the intellectual property dispute.
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.
By Rachel Kincaid
As the COVID-19 pandemic persists, and as we face the reality that future pandemics are coming (or have already begun), it’s a fitting time for the United States to take stock of how the carceral system has exacerbated the harms of COVID-19, and for policymakers to seriously consider what can and should be done differently going forward.
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.
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.
By Jennifer S. Bard
As weekly deaths from COVID in the U.S. soar into thousands, monkeypox continues to spread, and New York reports the country’s first case of paralytic polio since 1979, it is fair to question the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s effectiveness and ability to achieve its mission to “to protect America from health, safety and security threats” and its pledge to “base all public health decisions on the highest quality scientific data that is derived openly and objectively” and “place the benefits to society above the benefits to our institution.”
By Gregory Curfman
Throughout its October 2021-2022 term, the Supreme Court has shown no evidence of judicial restraint, dispelling any remaining illusions that the judiciary is, in the words of Alexander Bickel and Alexander Hamilton, “The Least Dangerous Branch.”