By Chloe Reichel
Turns out, one of the unspoken eligibility requirements for COVID-19 vaccination is a car.
At least, it was for Pradeep Niroula, a researcher based in College Park, Md. Last week, Niroula was turned away from his scheduled appointment at a mass vaccination site in Maryland for arriving on foot.
By Chloe Reichel
As COVID-19 vaccines become more widespread, passports that certify immunization status may facilitate a return to normalcy, write Lawrence O. Gostin, I. Glenn Cohen, and Jana Shaw in a viewpoint published today in JAMA.
But these vaccine passports, or digital health passes, are not without scientific, legal, and ethical challenges.
I asked Gostin, Faculty Director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University Law Center, Cohen, Faculty Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, and Shaw, a professor of pediatrics at Upstate Medical University, about the key areas of concern and promise for vaccine passports. Our conversation, which has been edited and condensed, follows.
By Govind Persad
Recently, Missouri expanded phase 2 vaccination eligibility with the goal of addressing disproportionate COVID-19 impacts.
Specifically, Missouri’s policy applies to “Disproportionately Affected Populations,” which is further defined as: “Populations at increased risk of acquiring or transmitting COVID-19, with emphasis on racial/ethnic minorities not otherwise included in 1B.”
This presents a much-debated and often misunderstood question I explore in a forthcoming University of Illinois Law Review article: can COVID-19 vaccine allocation legally recognize the outsized burden of cases and deaths that racial/ethnic minority communities have borne during the pandemic?
By Jennifer S. Bard
Lawyers and law professors are very much part of the ongoing efforts to make policy in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Like everyone else involved, we face the particular challenge of being confronted daily with what seems to be an ever-changing flow of information about a newly emerged and rapidly mutating virus.
But what may help us better make or evaluate policy is a better understanding of some typical characteristics of viruses that make all of them very difficult to contain, rather than just the unique features of the one threatening us now.
Knowing more about the ways that viruses spread could help us avoid the pitfalls of declaring victory too early, rolling back existing infection control measures, and ending up worse off than we have been at any stage of this pandemic.
By Chloe Reichel
On February 26th, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a shadow docket decision that could foretell sweeping limitations for public health measures, both within and outside the COVID-19 pandemic context.
The Court’s ruling in the case, Gateway City Church v. Newsom, blocked a county-level ban on church services, despite the fact that the ban applied across the board to all indoor gatherings. This religious exceptionalism is emerging as a key trend in recent Supreme Court decisions, particularly those related to COVID-19 restrictions.
To better understand what these rulings might mean for public health, free exercise of religion, the future of the COVID-19 pandemic, and potential vaccine mandates, I spoke with Professor Elizabeth Sepper, an expert in religious liberty, health law, and equality at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law.
This post originally appeared on the Harvard Law Review Blog.
By I. Glenn Cohen and Dorit Rubinstein Reiss
In the last year, colleges and universities across the U.S. struggled with how to operate during the COVID-19 pandemic. The most recent data, from January 2021, shows a mix of online and in-person modes of instruction.
At the same time, a study of the experience in early fall 2020 found an association between colleges and universities with in-person instruction and increased infection incidence in the counties within which the schools were located. With vaccine authorization in the U.S. and the promise of potential availability for student populations in late spring and summer 2021 (in most states’ allocation plans these students are among the last groups in prioritization), there is increasing interest by higher education institutions in moving more of their fall 2021 educational instruction and non-instructional activities to in-person modes. Vaccinating students is a key step to safely reopening campuses, in whole or in part, in a way that is safe for students, faculty, staff, and local communities. At the same time, university leaders are likely reasonably concerned about the legality of mandating COVID-19 vaccines. Not all students, faculty or staff may appreciate such a requirement, and anti-vaccine groups are more than ready to assist in litigation — as, for example, they did when the University of California required influenza vaccines for on-campus attendance (a preliminary injunction in that case was denied). In this essay, we discuss whether universities can legally require vaccination as a condition of attendance and with what accommodations.
By Vrushab Gowda
Weaponized COVID vaccine skepticism efforts are mounting in frequency. Just days ago, the State Department named three Kremlin-backed platforms engaged in a sustained campaign targeting Pfizer and Moderna products.
They are not alone, with Chinese and Iranian outlets following close on their heels.
Cross-posted from COVID-19 and The Law, where it originally appeared on January 27, 2021.
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Since the Food & Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization for the COVID-19 vaccines produced by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna in December 2020, there have been many debates on vaccine allocation and prioritization.
As noted by Harvard Law School Professor Glenn Cohen in a recent interview with Annie Kapnick for the COVID-19 and The Law series, the issue of vaccine distribution is “complicated” because of competing factors decision-makers must consider. The relative weights placed on these factors has led to very different prioritization schemes. Initially, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommended a hybrid plan that appeared to prioritize individuals who were most likely to contract the virus (e.g., first responders, grocery store workers) over individuals most vulnerable to severe symptoms or death from the virus if contracted (e.g., individuals over the age of 65 not in long-term care facilities). In the United Kingdom, the prioritization groups were primarily based on vulnerability. Similarly, when looking more narrowly at the various plans being implemented at the state level in the United States, there are high degrees of variation.
This post does not seek to evaluate the merits of these or other specific vaccine allocation plans. Rather, it will address a risk that all plans likely face: the potential of individuals using their wealth and access to “cut the line” and be vaccinated ahead of schedule.
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By Chloe Reichel
High-profile commentators have argued recently that vaccine scarcity needn’t exist. If vaccine manufacturers simply shared their patents with other pharmaceutical companies, supply would quickly ramp up.
The vaccine shortage doesn’t need to exist. Pfizer and Moderna could share their design with the dozens of other pharma companies who stand ready to produce their vaccines and end the pandemic.
— James Hamblin (@jameshamblin) February 2, 2021
Others have pointed out that numerous bottlenecks exist in the manufacturing process, from the glass vials that hold the vaccine, to the lipids that encase the vaccine’s active ingredient, mRNA.
And even if these bottlenecks didn’t exist, the intellectual property argument may be a straw man.
Folks. I know this sounds simple and easy which is why it has 1000 likes. But it is not that simple. Moderna has open licensed, albeit imperfectly https://t.co/PUdpGfTbhJ , and it’s still not simple. See, eg, https://t.co/OEX2qCBd9J.
— Govind Persad (@GovindPersad) February 2, 2021
In fact, this past October, Moderna made a gesture toward opening access to its intellectual property, by pledging that it would not enforce its patents against “those making vaccines intended to combat the pandemic.” That month, Jorge L. Contreras, a Presidential Scholar and Professor of Law at the University of Utah, covered the patent pledge and its potential implications for Bill of Health.
We checked in with Contreras to ask about the implications of Moderna’s patent pledge now that its vaccine has been proven safe and effective. Here are the highlights from the conversation:
Cross-posted from Written Description, where it originally appeared on February 18, 2021.
By Rachel Sachs, Jacob S. Sherkow, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, and Nicholson Price
In our last post, we introduced some of the clinical evidence supporting the use of therapeutic antibodies against COVID-19—including Regeneron’s casirivimab and imdevimab and Eli Lilly’s bamlanivimab—and analyzed the existing problems in the distribution and administration of those therapies. Even in just the last few weeks, further clinical evidence has supported the use of these technologies, leading the FDA to issue an additional emergency use authorization for Lilly’s bamlanivimab and etesevimab cocktail. In the near future, though, problems in administering our existing supply of these new drugs may give way to problems producing enough of them—a challenge that is also affecting the vaccine rollout. In this post, we consider the difficult manufacturing issues involved in the therapeutic antibody context (a subject we’ve previously explored regarding vaccines), and what might be done to address them.
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