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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Public/Private Distinction In Public Health: The Case Of Covid-19, Aziza Ahmed, Jason Jackson
The Public/Private Distinction In Public Health: The Case Of Covid-19, Aziza Ahmed, Jason Jackson
Faculty Scholarship
In this Essay, we argue that the paradigm of the public/private distinction is implicitly operating as a primary frame in the public health response to the pandemic. The public/private distinction is particularly evident in the guidance around masking and other risk-mitigation policies and advice issued by public health agencies. This public health approach reifies the notion of the home as an exceptional private space that exists outside of the possibility of COVID-19 transmission, obscuring the reality of the high risk of transmission in some households. 8 We argue that the manifestation of the public/private distinction in the COVID-19 response is …
Where Is The “Public” In American Public Health? Moving From Individual Responsibility To Collective Action, Cecília Tomori, Dabney P. Evans, Aziza Ahmed, Aparna Nair, Benjamin Mason Meier
Where Is The “Public” In American Public Health? Moving From Individual Responsibility To Collective Action, Cecília Tomori, Dabney P. Evans, Aziza Ahmed, Aparna Nair, Benjamin Mason Meier
Faculty Scholarship
American individualism continues to prove incommensurate to the public health challenge of COVID-19. Where the previous US Administration silenced public health science, neglected rising inequalities, and undermined global solidarity in the early pandemic response, the Biden Administration has sought to take action to respond to the ongoing pandemic. However, the Administration's overwhelming focus on individual responsibility over population-level policy stands in sharp contrast to fundamental tenets of public health that emphasize “what we, as a society, do collectively to assure the conditions for people to be healthy”. When this misalignment of individual responsibility and public health initially became clear with …
Abortion Experts, Aziza Ahmed
Abortion Experts, Aziza Ahmed
Faculty Scholarship
The COVID-19 pandemic, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade,1 has intensified the fight for access to medication abortion. 2 As state governors put emergency orders into place limiting health care provisions to essential services, some also limited access to abortion, designating it a nonessential service. 3 In the face of these challenges, women's health advocates, in keeping with prior advocacy, have called for greater access to medication abortion.4 The increased reliance on telemedicine during the COVID-19 pandemic provides new possibilities for the provision of abortion medication that do not rely on a patient engaging in-person at a …
Securitizing Notes Of Small Businesses And Needy Workers, Tamar Frankel
Securitizing Notes Of Small Businesses And Needy Workers, Tamar Frankel
Faculty Scholarship
Businesses, whether large ones or small ones, such as restaurants and small shops, are presently closed and some of their employees have been laid off.1 Currently, the government is lending money to these small businesses2 and the now unemployed workers for their sustenance. It then collects the payments from some of the borrowers and the source of the rest of the money is taxes.3 Since not all, or perhaps only a few, small businesses own real estate, they might sign notes promising to repay the loans but can offer no asset backing. Presumably, the nation’s financial deficit …
The Jury Trial Reinvented, Christopher Robertson, Michael Shammas
The Jury Trial Reinvented, Christopher Robertson, Michael Shammas
Faculty Scholarship
The Framers of the Sixth and Seventh Amendments to the United States Constitution recognized that jury trials were essential for maintaining democratic legitimacy and avoiding epistemic crises. As an institution, the jury trial is purpose-built to engage citizens in the process of deliberative, participatory democracy with ground rules. The jury trial provides a carefully constructed setting aimed at sorting truth from falsehood.
Despite its value, the jury trial has been under assault for decades. Concededly, jury trials can sometimes be inefficient, unreliable, unpredictable, and impractical. The COVID–19 pandemic rendered most physical jury trials unworkable but spurred some courts to begin …
Public Health And The Power To Exclude: Immigrant Expulsions At The Border, Sarah R. Sherman-Stokes
Public Health And The Power To Exclude: Immigrant Expulsions At The Border, Sarah R. Sherman-Stokes
Faculty Scholarship
We are presently in the midst of a crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border, as Courts, and indeed the Biden Administration, are struggling to manage thousands of immigrants waiting to seek asylum in the midst of a global pandemic. Beginning in March of 2020, against the advice of public health experts, the U.S. Government closed the southern U.S.-Mexico border, disproportionately impacting would-be asylum seekers from Central America, who are now immediately expelled from the United States should they reach the border under a process known as “Title 42.” Not only do these expulsions lack a legitimate public health rationale, but they …
Effects Of Political Versus Expert Messaging On Vaccination Intentions Of Trump Voters, Christopher Robertson, Keith Bentele, Beth Meyerson, Alexander Wood, Jacqueline Salwa
Effects Of Political Versus Expert Messaging On Vaccination Intentions Of Trump Voters, Christopher Robertson, Keith Bentele, Beth Meyerson, Alexander Wood, Jacqueline Salwa
Faculty Scholarship
To increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake in resistant populations, such as Republicans, focus groups suggest that it is best to de-politicize the issue by sharing five facts from a public health expert. Yet polls suggest that Trump voters trust former President Donald Trump for medical advice more than they trust experts. We conducted an online, randomized, national experiment among 387 non-vaccinated Trump voters, using two brief audiovisual artifacts from Spring 2021, either facts delivered by an expert versus political claims delivered by President Trump. Relative to the control group, Trump voters who viewed the video of Trump endorsing the vaccine were …
Standard Racism: Trying To Use “Crisis Standards Of Care” In The Covid-19 Pandemic, George J. Annas, Sondra S. Crosby
Standard Racism: Trying To Use “Crisis Standards Of Care” In The Covid-19 Pandemic, George J. Annas, Sondra S. Crosby
Faculty Scholarship
Lowering the standard of care in a pandemic is a recipe for inferior care and discrimination. Wealthy white patients will continue to get “standard of care” medicine, while the poor and racial minorities (especially black and brown people) will get what is openly described as substandard care rationalized by the assertion that substandard care is all that we can deliver to them in a crisis. (IOM Citation2009) Paul Farmer’s experience in responding to the Ebola outbreak in West Africa is a shocking, if extreme, example of how dangerous to patients this practice is. White patients were treated with the …
Designing An Independent Public Health Agency, Jacqueline Salwa, Christopher Robertson
Designing An Independent Public Health Agency, Jacqueline Salwa, Christopher Robertson
Faculty Scholarship
We believe that Congress should act on a bipartisan basis to fix U.S. public health institutions. Legislators could decide to merely buttress current institutions, as former commissioners have suggested be done for the FDA.1 Alternatively, legislators could consider a broad reorganization of public health functions and create a superagency, whose purview would include everything from the approval of drugs and devices to the maintenance of national stockpiles of protective equipment.
Addressing Public Health’S Failings During Year One Of Covid-19, George J. Annas, Sandro Galea
Addressing Public Health’S Failings During Year One Of Covid-19, George J. Annas, Sandro Galea
Faculty Scholarship
By almost any measure, public health fell short during 2020. In retrospect, the list of what public health professionals, including federal and state public health officials, public health practitioners, and academics, could have done better is easy to articulate, and has already been the subject of angry books about the disasterous responses to the pandemic in Europe and the US [1,2]. It falls to all of us to pause, reflect, and ask: how do we move forward? We have five suggestions.
The Need For A Strong And Stable Federal Public Health Agency Independent From Politicians, Jacqueline Salwa, Christopher Robertson
The Need For A Strong And Stable Federal Public Health Agency Independent From Politicians, Jacqueline Salwa, Christopher Robertson
Faculty Scholarship
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the precariousness of federal public health institutions in the United States, and how disastrously things can go when those institutions are undermined by political forces. Such institutions can be disbanded, underfunded, populated with incompetent political hacks, manipulated, or sidelined. As a field, public health in particular needs some political space, given that it requires deep scientific expertise and needs to communicate to the public clearly, reliably, and with authority to engender trust. Key public health agencies, such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in particular, should be buttressed against future political encroachment, …
Race, Risk, And Personal Responsibility In The Response To Covid-19, Aziza Ahmed, Jason Jackson
Race, Risk, And Personal Responsibility In The Response To Covid-19, Aziza Ahmed, Jason Jackson
Faculty Scholarship
The COVID-19 crisis has tragically revealed the depth of racial inequities in the United States. This Piece argues that the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on racial minorities is a symptom of a failing approach to public health, one that privileges individual behaviors over the structural conditions that generate vulnerability and inequitable health outcomes. Despite clear racial disparities in illness and deaths, the neoliberal ideology of personal responsibility shifts the onus for mitigation of risk away from the social and legal determinants of health and onto the individual. To understand how and why these disparate racial outcomes arise, this Piece …
The Limits Of Medical X-Pertise: Gender Markers In A Pandemic, Heron Greenesmith, Andy Izenson
The Limits Of Medical X-Pertise: Gender Markers In A Pandemic, Heron Greenesmith, Andy Izenson
Faculty Scholarship
The world changed drastically in 2020. The pandemic has far reaching consequences, and so too do the current civil rights movements and the struggle for gender justice and liberation. This Article seeks to describe a moment in time, a moment of doubt of how one 's gender and race will predict one 's ability to survive the pandemic-not simply COVID-19, but the pandemic writ-large and all the wrenches it has thrown into the health-care machine. How do those of us standing at the edge of a gender revolution navigate these waters? Will our health be the price we pay for …
Rationing Crisis: Bogus Standards Of Care Unmasked By Covid-19, George J. Annas
Rationing Crisis: Bogus Standards Of Care Unmasked By Covid-19, George J. Annas
Faculty Scholarship
After the spectacular failure to apply acceptable triage methods to evacuate patients from a flooded Memorial Hospital during Hurricane Katrina, preparedness planning was intensified (Fink Citation2013). Regarding physicians and hospitals, two approaches got the most attention: (1) diluting the legal “standard of care” for physicians and hospitals so they would be immune from lawsuit for negligent acts during a crisis (“crisis standards of care”); and (2) developing triage protocols for scarce resource allocation. Both can be considered crude works in process. Nonetheless, in the midst of the greatest national crisis since 9/11, I think it is time to declare …
A Proposal For Taxing Cryptocurrency In The Midst Of The Covid-19 Pandemic, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Xiuyuan (Tony) Hu
A Proposal For Taxing Cryptocurrency In The Midst Of The Covid-19 Pandemic, Richard Thompson Ainsworth, Xiuyuan (Tony) Hu
Faculty Scholarship
In this article, the authors present the case for a globally effective remedial tax on cryptocurrency transactions that could help fund multinational relief efforts, such as providing aid to jurisdictions affected by the COVID-19 virus and countries fighting the opioid crisis.