By Hannah Rahim
Food is Medicine interventions aim to prevent and treat diet-related chronic health conditions and reduce food insecurity by providing food to individuals and communities, in connection with the health care system. While Food is Medicine has been gaining prominence in recent years, it has also received some criticism. This article will explore the development of Food is Medicine and its limitations, and briefly offer recommendations for successful Food is Medicine initiatives.
By Maxim Tvorun-Dunn
Silicon Valley depends on boom-and-bust cycles, manufacturing a new wave of investments every few months by promising grand technological revolutions, whether through AI, cryptocurrency, metaverses, or any other buzzword of the tech industry. These bubbles are furnished by media narratives and tech journalism. Through uncritical reporting of press releases and overexaggerating claims, news outlets help tech industrialists inflate their stock portfolios, while regularly ignoring the politics of privatization and automation. Reporting on psychedelics has followed similar trends, regularly positioning research on psychedelic therapy or drug manufacturing as Silicon Valley’s latest panacea.
By Timothy Fish Hodgson, Roojin Habibi, and Alicia Ely Yamin
In developing the digital symposium, From Principles to Practice: Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (which ran from October – December 2023), as editors we endeavored to get scholars, human rights advocates, judges, and policy makers to engage critically with the expert Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (the PHE Principles), published by the International Commission of Jurists and the Global Health Law Consortium in May 2023. In doing so, we encouraged contributors to comment on the Principles’ potential usefulness as guidance in addressing real emergency situations, as well as any possible gaps and weaknesses.
While summarizing the entire content of the 13 blogs comprising this symposium in any depth is not possible here, this concluding post will attempt to synthesize some of the major inputs from the contributions. We also provide some of our own observations, as participants in the drafting of the Principles, with the aim of pushing the discussion prompted by the posts forward.
By Aparajita Lath*
The World Health Organization (WHO), in collaboration with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), hosted the 10th Trilateral Symposium on Human Health and Climate Change in Geneva this November. This article reflects the significant effort made to put climate-sensitive diseases, many of which are neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), at the forefront of these talks.
By Tara Davis and Nicola Soekoe
In January 2021, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) observed that the world was on the brink of a “catastrophic moral failure” if wealthier nations did not ensure the equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. Global health activists and civil society organizations who worked transnationally to curtail what came to be referred to as “vaccine apartheid” faced a pharmaceutical industry that globally relied on secrecy, capital-friendly trade laws, and brute economic force to shirk considerations of human rights. In many ways, pharmaceutical companies and the states that protected them, including by failing to achieve consensus at the World Trade Organization (WTO) for a waiver of intellectual property rights with respect to vaccines, seemed impenetrable.
Unsurprisingly, given the extreme position of power from which pharmaceutical companies were negotiating contracts, there were widespread reports and allegations of inequitable contractual terms and a culture of bullying in the development of contracts. This was an issue of global concern for a long period during the pandemic. In South Africa, the Health Justice Initiative (HJI), a local advocacy organization, joined the global calls for greater procurement transparency.
However, when the South African Department of Health refused to disclose even the names of the entities with which it had entered into vaccine-related agreements, the HJI was forced to turn to the courts for relief.
By Anne Kjersti Befring and Cecilia Marcela Bailliet
The COVID-19 pandemic posed a grave threat to humanity and revealed the need for a new approach to improve transnational cooperation within the global health system and new perspectives on solidarity addressing the cross-border spread of infection and distribution of vaccines.
The Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (“the Principles”), developed by the Global Health Law Consortium and the International Commission of Jurists, set forth a human rights-based solidarity approach that can provide a basis for implementing the obligations of States and responsibilities of Non-State actors to achieve the goal of limiting the harmful effects of serious health crises.
By Zione Ntaba
Malawi is not a stranger to public health crises in the last number of years, having faced a severe HIV epidemic and several cholera outbreaks continuing into 2023. Nevertheless, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic caused a major panic in the country’s legal system and judiciary. COVID-19 brought to fruition a major ethical dilemma in ensuring the justice system’s continued functioning, while also protecting the lives of all those involved, and simultaneously ensuring the promotion and protection of human rights.
The constitutional mandate of ensuring access to justice in Malawi, a country which already struggles with effective and efficient justice delivery at the best of times, required urgent resolution, especially noting the potential of human rights violations arising from State responses to COVID-19 worldwide. Interestingly, in addition to the general need to safeguard the justice system as a whole, the pandemic itself brought before the courts issues relating to public health and human rights.
The prevailing principle in Malawi, as it is internationally, is for the judicial system to ensure that there exists an equal balance between the protection and promotion of human rights and the fair and just administration of justice. The courts in Malawi were called upon to rise above the political bureaucracy, to ensure judicial impartiality when dealing with pandemic-related issues. This was crucial in a context in which political responses to the pandemic sometimes remained unquestioned or unchallenged. However, unless these principles — of human rights and fair administration of justice — were properly upheld by the courts, sadly they may have remained in the world of the metaphysical.
It is with this context in mind that I turn to reflecting on the Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (“Principles”).
By Nerima Were and Allan Maleche
Taking into account our experiences as human rights lawyers working in Kenya during the COVID-19 pandemic, in this article we briefly analyze the Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (the Principles) and make a case for their utility in guiding State measures to prepare for, prevent, and respond to future pandemics consistently with international human rights law and standards.
By Eduardo Arenas Catalán
The Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (the Principles), entail a notable attempt to consolidate lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic. After the largely non-solidaristic international response to COVID-19, the Principles outline the advantages and limitations of embedding human rights discourse within the global public health machinery.
One key element that will test the Principles will be their ability to influence the measures taken, including by States, in preparing for, preventing, and responding to future public health emergencies with increased solidarity. That uncertain future aside, by incorporating critical elements of solidarity, which so far have been largely absent in the human rights corpus, these Principles strengthen the protection of human rights in international law.
By Brianna da Silva Bhatia, Michele Heisler, and Christian De Vos
American health care too often fails to protect the right to health or promote health-related rights. Despite efforts to increase access to health care and to better incentivize high-quality, value-based care, the United States’ health care system remains fragmented, largely profit-based, and predominantly disease-focused rather than prevention-focused.
To design systems and policies that promote the right to health, a holistic and proactive approach is needed, one in which people, institutions, and corporations have a shared responsibility in promoting physical, mental, and social well-being. The Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (the Principles), allow us to imagine a new future and help outline a path for how to get there. In this piece, we discuss how the Principles might be applied in a rights-based approach to address some of the core problems in the U.S. health care system.