Tag: health equity

Doctor or surgeon with organ transport after organ donation for surgery in front of the clinic in protective clothing.

How to Encourage Organ Donation

James W. Lytle Leave a comment

By James W. Lytle

Last week, Bill of Health published a Q&A with Phil Walton, the Project Lead for Deemed Consent Legislation with the National Health Service Blood and Transplant Division, and Alexandra Glazier, the President/CEO of the New England Donor Services.

In the first part of this conversation, Walton and Glazier described the various frameworks undergirding organ donor registries in their home countries. Walton detailed the “deemed consent” or “opt-out” registry employed by Wales and England, while Glazier detailed the opt-in, prompted choice framework in the U.S.

In this second installment, Walton and Glazier discuss strategies to encourage organ donation, regardless of the opt-in or opt-out framework. The conversation also touched on health disparities and strategies to address them.

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Sign that reads "Racism is a pandemic too."

Editor’s Choice: Important Reads on Race and Health

Chloe Reichel Leave a comment

By Chloe Reichel

Racism was embedded in the founding of the United States and has persisted in virtually all aspects of our society through the present day.

In 2020, structural racism was made especially apparent in the disproportionate toll the COVID-19 pandemic has taken on communities of color, which can be traced back to the social determinants of health, and in grotesque displays of police violence, such as the killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Elijah McClain.

Racism is the public health issue of our time, after having been woefully un- or under-addressed for centuries. The following posts, which were published on Bill of Health this year, highlight some of the most pressing issues to confront, as well as potential ways forward.

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This 2006 image depicted a nurse, who was administering an intramuscular vaccination into a middle-aged man’s left shoulder muscle. The nurse was using her left hand to stabilize the injection site.

An Equity-Based Strategy for COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution

Megan Shen Leave a comment

By Megan J. Shen

How COVID-19 vaccines roll out in the U.S. will highlight the nation’s priorities, and potentially also its persistent disparities.

Top of the list to receive the vaccine are frontline healthcare workers, who were the first to receive Pfizer’s new vaccine this week.

Next will come long-term care facility residents and workers. This is critical, as long-term care residents have suffered perhaps the most devastating death toll, killing over 100,000 residents.

But there is still a long winter ahead where many will not yet have access to the vaccine. And it remains unclear how the next round of vaccine recipients will be allocated to serve the most vulnerable populations.

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Waitress wears face mask and face shield, cleans table with alcohol and wet wipe at restaurant.

The Problem with Individual-Level Interventions to Curb the COVID-19 Pandemic

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By Daniel Goldberg

The failure to control the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States rests, in part, on the individualist nature of our public health responses.

Public health simply does not work well when we base our interventions on the individual level. This is known as “methodological individualism,” and the evidence suggests it is both ineffective and can expand existing health inequalities. It is problematic in any public health context, but especially in pandemic response and control.

Take, for example, the ongoing debate over mask mandates. Multiple governors have refused to issue mask mandates, instead simply requesting that people don masks. The objection, interestingly, is not to the idea of masking as a public health intervention, but to the existence of a mandate itself.

Yet a model of public health which consists of nothing more than pleading with individuals to avoid behaving in ways injurious to public health would be an abject failure. Imagine if, instead of imposing minimum requirements for clean water, we simply asked regulated industries to avoid polluting watersheds. Or perhaps instead of passing laws discouraging or even criminalizing obviously harmful behavior, we simply asked people to avoid driving drunk.

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people waiting in a line.

Advance Health Equity by Getting Vaccine Distribution Right

Nicolas P. Terry Leave a comment

By Sarah de Guia and Nicolas Terry

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is poised to decide soon whether to authorize the emergency use of COVID-19 vaccines. While this is positive news, critical decisions remain about the equitable allocation of the vaccine.

On December 10, 2020, the FDA will hold a meeting of its vaccine advisory committee to consider an emergency use authorization (EUA) sought by Pfizer/BioNTech for its COVID-19 vaccine candidate. A week later, the committee likely will consider a similar request from Moderna for its candidate. The UK is moving on an even more aggressive timeline and has already approved the Pfizer/BioNTech candidate.

In 2020, it is expected that doses will be ready for only 20 million Americans; there will not be general availability until the second quarter of 2021.

So, who will get the vaccine soonest, and will those decisions be based on equitable criteria?

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Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Georgia, Atlanta USA March 6, 2020.

The Politics of CDC Public Health Guidance During COVID-19

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

A version of this post first ran in Ms. Magazine on October 28, 2020. It has been adapted slightly for Bill of Health. 

By Aziza Ahmed

In recent months, public health guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has become a site of political reckoning.

The agency has taken an enormous amount of heat from a range of institutions, including the executive and the public, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The former has sought to intervene in public health guidance to ensure that the CDC presents the President and administration’s response to COVID-19 in a positive light. The latter consists of opposed factions that demand more rigorous guidance, or, its opposite, less stringent advice.

Importantly, these tensions have revealed how communities experience the pandemic differently. CDC guidance has produced divergent consequences, largely depending on demographics. These differences have been particularly pronounced along racial lines.

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Grocery store.

COVID-19 Highlights the Vital Connection Between Food and Health

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Browne C. Lewis

Together, food insecurity and COVID-19 have proven to be a deadly combination for Black and Brown people.

Data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that COVID-19 hospitalization rates among Black and Latino populations have been approximately 4.7 times the rate of their white peers. The CDC suggests that a key driver of these disparities are inequities in the social determinants of health.

Healthy People 2020 defines social determinants of health as “conditions in the environments in which people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks.” The lack of access to good quality food is one of the main social determinants of health. People who eat unhealthy food are more likely to have diet-related medical conditions, like hypertension and diabetes, that make them more susceptible to developing severe or fatal COVID-19.

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Janitor mopping floor in hallway office building or walkway after school and classroom silhouette work job with sun light background.

Overworked, Overlooked, and Unprotected: Domestic Workers and COVID-19

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Mariah A. Lindsay*

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected communities already facing multiple oppressions, including women, people of color, people living with low incomes, and immigrants.

This post focuses on the impacts of the pandemic on a group that encompasses many of these identities: domestic workers, such as home health care workers, house cleaners, and child care workers.

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a crowd of people shuffling through a sidewalk

COVID-19 Immunity as Passport to Work Will Increase Economic Inequality

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Ifeoma Ajunwa

As scientists develop increasingly accurate tests for COVID-19 immunity, we must be on guard as to potential inequities arising from their use, particularly with respect to their potential application as a prerequisite for returning to the workplace.

A focus on immunity as a yardstick for return to work will only serve to widen the gulf of economic inequality, especially in countries like the U.S., which has severe racial health care disparities and uneven access to effective healthcare. This focus could also serve to diminish societal support for further understanding and curtailing the disease.

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Society or population, social diversity. Flat cartoon vector illustration.

Unequal Representation: Race, Sex, and Trust in Medicine — COVID-19 and Beyond

The Petrie-Flom Center Staff Leave a comment

By Allison M. Whelan*

The COVID-19 pandemic has given renewed importance and urgency to the need for racial and gender diversity in clinical trials.

The underrepresentation of women in clinical research throughout history is a well-recognized problem, particularly for pregnant women. This stems, in part, from paternalism, a lack of respect for women’s autonomy, and concerns about women’s “vulnerability.” It harms women’s health as well as their dignity.

Over the years, FDA rules and guidance have helped narrow these gaps, and recent data suggest that women’s enrollment in clinical trials that were used to support new drug approvals was equal to or greater than men’s enrollment. Nevertheless, there is still progress to be made, especially for pregnant women. In the context of COVID-19 research, one review of 371 interventional trials found that 75.8% of drug trials declared pregnancy as an exclusion criteria, a concerning statistic given that recent data suggest that contracting COVID-19 during pregnancy may increase the risk of preterm birth.

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