By Rossella De Falco
Strong, well-coordinated and resilient public health care services play a vital role in preventing and responding to public health crises. Under international human rights law, States have a positive, primary obligation to ensure that such health care services are of the highest possible quality and accessible to everyone, everywhere, and without discrimination.
By Calvin Wai-Loon Ho
With the mainstreaming of digital technology across many spheres of social life, infodemic management must be an integral part of public health emergency prevention, preparedness, response, and recovery.
While the Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (the Principles) do not make explicit reference to infodemics, the application of digital technologies in response to a public health emergency is a clear concern. This article provides further elaboration and critique of the Principles and their treatment of this emergent phenomenon.
By Kayum Ahmed, Julia Bleckner, and Kyle Knight
In mid-May, the World Health Organization officially declared the “emergency” phase of the COVID-19 pandemic over. However, the deep wounds of the pandemic remain, compelling those concerned about this pandemic and future health emergencies to account for catastrophic failures by those in power. These reflections suggest that the public health crisis could have been addressed differently, both reducing COVID-19’s unprecedented magnitude of illness and death, and preserving human dignity.
The COVID-19 pandemic isn’t over, and the end of this pandemic’s emergency phase certainly doesn’t mean we accept the widely abysmal response as the model for the world’s reaction to the next one. Public health emergencies aren’t entirely preventable. We live in a complex world where health is increasingly affected by a changing climate, extraordinary levels of pollution, and inadequate preventive and responsive health services. Emergencies will happen. But when they do, responses that uphold human rights need to be the norm.
By Roojin Habibi, Timothy Fish Hodgson, and Alicia Ely Yamin
Today, as the world transitions from living in the grips of a novel coronavirus to living with an entrenched, widespread infectious disease known as COVID-19, global appreciation for the human rights implications of public health crises are once again rapidly fading from view.
Against the backdrop of this burgeoning collective amnesia, a project to articulate the human rights norms relevant to public health emergencies led to the development of the 2023 Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (the Principles).
This symposium gathers reflections from leading scholars, activists, jurists, and others from around the world with respect to the recently issued Principles.
By Nikhil Chaudhry and Reshma Ramachandran
Earlier this month, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it had successfully included a reasonable pricing provision in a $326M investment contract with Regeneron for development of a next generation monoclonal antibody therapy for COVID-19. This was the first time the Biden Administration had included such a provision as part of its research funding agreements with the private sector, demonstrating that it is indeed possible for the federal government to negotiate deals with pharmaceutical companies that ensure that products developed with public dollars are priced comparably to the global market.
By Katherine Macfarlane and Irina Manta
Since fall 2021, when most colleges and universities reopened their campuses to in-person activities, it has become increasingly difficult for faculty and students with disabilities to obtain reasonable accommodations to teach or attend class remotely. Remote accommodations were granted freely during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, but in 2021, the in-person aspect of teaching and learning was suddenly deemed essential, and at many institutions, remote classes came to an end. Despite federal disability law’s requirement that each reasonable accommodation request be assessed individually, faculty and students alike were met with bright-line policies that remote teaching and learning were out of the question.
The language and logic used to deny these accommodations at universities across the country was suspiciously similar. We wondered to ourselves whether a memo had been circulated instructing universities about which magic words to employ to deny each accommodation request. But no matter what words are used, across-the-board policies that do not contemplate accommodation-based exceptions and fail to assess accommodation requests on an individual basis do not comply with federal disability law. A recent federal case brought by a high-risk professor against his university employer has recognized these well-settled principles and highlighted the problem with formulaic denials.
By Nate Holdren
Last week, David Leonhardt took to the pages of the New York Times to celebrate the latest COVID death figures, which he claims mean the U.S. is no longer in a pandemic, because there are no more “excess deaths.”
The hunger for good news is, of course, understandable amid this ongoing nightmare. But to respond to death with “smile everyone, it could have been more deaths!” is grotesque because of the disrespect to the dead and those most affected by the deaths.
It also lets the powerful off the hook, which is Leonhardt’s primary motivation, I assume. In other words, looking for good news is a political position.
By Katherine A. Macfarlane
In May 2023, Mass General Brigham instructed its patients that they “cannot ask staff members to wear a mask because our policies no longer require it.”
Following patient protests, the hospital updated its policies with an imperfect fix, announcing that “patients can ask, but providers determine when and if masking in a particular situation is clinically necessary.”
This episode highlights the uneasy circumstances that people with disabilities face in the U.S. while accessing essential care: On the one hand, the law surrounding reasonable modifications in health care is well-settled. On the other, the practical reality of U.S. health care leaves little room for individualized accommodation and self-advocating patients vulnerable to retaliation.
By Sam Friedman
Amid an emergent international consensus that the COVID pandemic is “over,” writings about the pandemic and its meanings have burst forth like the flowers of June.
This article will focus on one such book, Lessons from the COVID War: An Investigative Report. Produced by an eminently established collection of people, The COVID Crisis Group. The book is intelligently critical of what was done during the pandemic, but at all points it remains within the confines of what is “politically respectable.” This respectability, I argue, means that their recommendations are too narrow to protect Americans, much less the populations of the Global South, from pandemics ahead (barring unexpectedly marvelous advances in vaccine breadth and rapidity of deployment).
This excerpt from the new book titled “We Want Them Infected” is printed with permission from Jonathan Howard, MD and Redhawk Publications.
By Jonathan Howard
On June 29, 2021, Dr. Harriet Hall penned an essay on the website Science Based Medicine titled “A New COVID-19 Myth?” in which she wrote:
A correspondent suggested I should have known that the pandemic was over months ago. That’s obviously a myth. But where did that idea come from?1
I knew the answer. Even before the first wave peaked, doctors suggested the worst was over and that measures to control the virus were more dangerous than the virus itself. This message was repeated regularly throughout the pandemic.