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 Daniel Goldberg
Too often throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers have justified controversial policy choices by stating that the world is not arranged in a way to make certain actions feasible. While practical difficulties matter, permitting such difficulties to exhaust the scope of our ethical obligations is a grave mistake that moves us farther away from a just and equitable world.
By Angela Tucker and Lisa Marie Simmons
This is a story about Oterious and Isell, our Black fathers who wanted us, and the system that prohibited them.
By Rickie Solinger
The racial and gender coercions at the heart of adoption clarify the violence inherent in Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s wish to revitalize adoption in America as a substitute for abortion.
The mass practice of adoption, which started in the U.S. in the post-World War II era, pressed white unwed mothers to surrender their babies to a four-faceted cause: preserving the face of white chastity in the era of emergent feminism; bolstering the fraying institutions of white male authority; reinscribing the hegemony of the white family (as this institution, itself, began to weaken); and crucially, underscoring the difference between Black and white.
By Cathy Zhang
The COVID-19 Public Health Emergency (PHE) expires at the end of this week, with Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra expected to renew the PHE once more to extend through mid-July.
When the PHE ultimately expires, this will also trigger the end of the Medicaid continuous enrollment requirement, under which states must provide continuous Medicaid coverage for enrollees through the end of the last month of the PHE in order to receive enhanced federal funding. This policy improves coverage and helps reduce churn, which is associated with poor health outcomes.
After the PHE, states can facilitate smooth transitions for those no longer eligible for Medicaid by taking advantage of the full 12- to 14- month period that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has established for redetermining eligibility.
In August 2021, CMS released guidance giving states up to 12 months following the end of the PHE to redetermine whether Medicaid enrollees were still eligible and renew coverage. Last month, CMS released new guidance specifying that states must initiate redeterminations and renewals within 12 months of the PHE ending, but have up to 14 months to complete them. The agency is encouraging states to spread its renewals over the course of the full 12-month unwinding period, processing no more than 1/9th of their caseloads in a month, in order to reduce the risk of inappropriate terminations.
By Robyn Powell
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the pervasive inequities experienced by historically marginalized communities, including people with disabilities.
Activists, legal professionals, scholars, and policymakers must critically examine the limitations of our current disability laws and policies, including the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), to elucidate why disabled people continue to endure these inequities, including those related to economic insecurity.
This post was originally published on the Verfassungsblog as part of our joint symposium on international pandemic lawmaking.
By Ilja Richard Pavone
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised unprecedented challenges for the global health framework and its long-term consequences are not yet in full sight. The legal and institutional regime aimed at preventing and controlling the spread of infectious diseases, grounded on the International Health Regulations (IHR) was heavily criticized.
The alarm mechanism based on the declaration of Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), in particular, has been severely tested. A PHEIC is an extraordinary event that constitutes a potential public health risk through the international spread of a disease outbreak. The WHO Director-General bases his decision to “ring the bell” upon the technical advice of an Emergency Committee (EC) carrying out “an assessment of the risk to human health, of the risk of international spread, and of the risk of interference with international traffic.”
A PHEIC, then, is declared only when an event is already sufficiently acute and has started to spread internationally. It is not an early warning, but a formal alert, and in the case of COVID-19 it was issued with extreme delay only on 30 January 2020, (one month after notification of early cases by the Chinese government), after Beijing had already adopted quarantine measures around the city of Wuhan, and draconian measures to curb the spread of the disease in the country had been announced.