By Jennifer S. Bard
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us time and time again that whatever progress we make in curbing transmission of the virus is tenuous, fragile, and easily reversed.
And yet, we continue on a hapless path of declaring premature victory and ending mitigation measures the moment cases begin to fall. We need only look back to recent history to see why relaxing at this present moment of decline is ill-advised.
By Malia Maier and Terry McGovern
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in higher rates of family violence. For advocates and funders, this provided important opportunities to partner with movements, including racial justice, Gender-Based Violence (GBV), Reproductive Justice, and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) movements.
We interviewed 24 GBV and SRHR service providers, advocacy organizations, and donors throughout the country to understand how the pandemic and concurrent racial justice movements were impacting critical GBV and SRHR services.
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As children are experiencing the highest rates of COVID-19 in many states, can efforts to universally preclude vaccination of those under 12 until the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) specifically authorizes use in that age group be justified?
In a case commentary published today in Pediatrics, we argue that the answer is no.
This view diverges from the positions of the American Association of Pediatrics, FDA, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In fact, the CDC, which controls the nation’s supply of COVID-19 vaccines, has taken steps to currently ban the practice of vaccinating youth under the age of 12.
We acknowledge that recommendations to widely vaccinate 5-11 year olds should await FDA and CDC guidance (which is expected soon, given upcoming advisory committee meetings). But, especially at the lower dose offered in pediatric clinical trials, we think that off-label pediatric administration of approved COVID-19 vaccines, like Pfizer’s Comirnaty mRNA vaccine, should be treated like other off-label uses and left to the individual risk-benefit judgments of doctors and patients (or here, parents).
By Katherine Macfarlane
Disability discrimination negatively impacts the health of people with disabilities, yet disability law often overlooks discrimination’s health consequences. A health justice framework does not. It recognizes that discrimination impacts health, and then goes a step further, highlighting how legal systems are complicit in perpetuating health injustice. That wider lens better captures the lived experiences of those who experience discrimination, including people with disabilities.
My own work explores disability law’s insistence that disability be confirmed through medical examination. Without confirmation from a health care provider, disability does not exist, and reasonable accommodations need not be provided. A health justice framework has deepened my understanding of the harm those encounters impose. Identifying the full scope of the harm people with disabilities endure is the first step toward dismantling the systems that cause it.
By Caroline E. Foster
A new pandemic instrument should explicitly embrace the three emerging global regulatory standards of due diligence, due regard, and regulatory coherence.
These standards sit at the interface between national and international law to help functionally align the two in ways that will protect and advance shared and competing interests in an interdependent world.
The standards require nations to exercise their regulatory power in certain ways, including demonstrating (i) due regard for the international legal rights and interests of others, (ii) due diligence in the prevention of harm to other States, and (iii) regulatory coherence between governmental measures and their objectives. These international law standards are already implicit in and given effect by the operation of WHO’s current International Health Regulations (IHR) of 2005.
As we develop new pandemic instruments, their presence should be made increasingly explicit. Giving a stronger profile to the standards will help generate new political impetus and new legal bases for implementation of world health law, and fit it to 21st century application.
By Lawrence O. Gostin
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed marked limitations in the International Health Regulations (IHR) and constrained authorities of the World Health Organization (WHO). With a rising imperative to advance pandemic preparedness and response, more than twenty heads of government proposed a new pandemic treaty. This prospective pandemic treaty offers a pathway to develop innovative international legal obligations, strengthening core capacities, good governance, and compliance mechanisms to prepare for novel outbreaks with pandemic potential.
By Tsung-Ling Lee
Despite the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recent efforts to broaden participation, the international infectious disease control regime remains state-centric.
As such, the state-centric infectious disease regime violates the fundamental principle of how contagious diseases spread within and across countries — the virus recognizes no national borders, nor does the virus discriminate. The longstanding global health mantra — no country is safe until all countries are safe; no one is safe until everyone is safe — should guide global pandemic preparedness.
By Aeyal Gross
The current discussion within the World Health Organization (WHO) of a “pandemic treaty” aims at better solutions to “health emergencies.”
But, if this focus on “emergencies” comes at the expense of chronic and underlying issues, including the overall status of health systems, we risk replicating, with this legal instrument, the colonial legacy of international health supposedly left behind with the shift to “global health.” This points to the urgent need to rethink what is considered a “crisis” or an “emergency,” as part of the effort to “decolonize global health,” including global health law (GHL).
By Joelle Grogan, on behalf of the editors*
This symposium, “International Pandemic Lawmaking: Conceptual and Practical Issues,” was convened with two primary aims: to shed light on the inequities and imbalances exposed by global pandemic response, and to advocate recommendations on which principles should guide the framing and drafting of a potential international instrument on pandemic preparedness and response.
However, while good principle can guide good action, to be effective it must be more than good principle; and more substance is needed than good design. Thus, these symposium posts published on Monday through Thursday on Bill of Health and the Verfassungsblog, along with our accompanying editorials, look not only to the design of such an instrument, but also its implementation and enforcement.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
By Douglas Laycock, University of Virginia
For Americans wary of COVID-19 vaccine mandates, like the sweeping requirements President Joe Biden announced Sept. 9, 2021, it seems there are plenty of leaders offering ways to get exemptions – especially religious ones.
No major organized religious group has officially discouraged the vaccine, and many, like the Catholic Church, have explicitly encouraged them. Yet pastors from New York to California have offered letters to help their parishioners – or sometimes anyone who asks – avoid the shots.
These developments point to deep confusion over how to win a religious exemption. So what are they, and is the government even required to offer the exemptions in the first place?
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