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Washington and Lee University School of Law

Health Law and Policy

Pandemic

Articles 1 - 8 of 8

Full-Text Articles in Law

Working While Mothering During The Pandemic And Beyond, Nicole Buonocore Porter Aug 2021

Working While Mothering During The Pandemic And Beyond, Nicole Buonocore Porter

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

Although combining work and family has never been easy for women, working while mothering during the pandemic was close to impossible. When COVID-19 caused most workplaces to shut down, many women were laid off. But many women were forced to work from home alongside their children, who could not attend daycare or school. Mothers tried valiantly to combine a full day’s work on top of caring for young children and helping school-aged children with remote school. But many found this balance difficult, leading to women’s lowest workforce participation rate in over forty years. And even women who did not quit …


Weathering The Pandemic: Dying Old At A Young Age From Pre-Existing Racist Conditions, Arline T. Geronimus Apr 2021

Weathering The Pandemic: Dying Old At A Young Age From Pre-Existing Racist Conditions, Arline T. Geronimus

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Mainstream social epidemiology now acknowledges the contributions of interpersonal racism, racialized stress, and implicit bias to population health inequity. It also increasingly recognizes that current and historical racist policies place barriers in the way of healthy lifestyles by institutionalizing food deserts, housing decay, and austerity urbanism. Essential as these developments are, they only skim the surface of how insidiously structural racism establishes and reproduces population health inequity. I coined the term “weathering” to describe the effects of sustained cultural oppression upon the body. Weathering expands on the more conventional “social determinants of health” approach to understand the contextually fluctuating and …


Empathy’S Promise And Limits For Those Disproportionately Harmed By The Covid-19 Pandemic, Theresa Glennon Apr 2021

Empathy’S Promise And Limits For Those Disproportionately Harmed By The Covid-19 Pandemic, Theresa Glennon

Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Structural race, ethnicity, and class disparities in the United States concentrated and intensified the health, economic, and psychological impact of COVID-19 for certain populations. Those same structural disparities and the belief system that maintains them may also account for the weak policy response that left the United States with high rates of infection and death, economic devastation of individuals, families, and small businesses, and psychological distress. A more equal society with a stronger pre-pandemic safety net may have prevented or eased the disproportionate hardship and avoided the drama and cliffhanging. Or the shock of a pandemic and likelihood of extreme …


Rationing In The Time Of Covid And The Perils Of Anti-Subordination Rhetoric, Mark Kelman Jan 2021

Rationing In The Time Of Covid And The Perils Of Anti-Subordination Rhetoric, Mark Kelman

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

With surges in COVID-19 cases threatening to overload some hospital facilities, we must face the possibility that therapeutic treatments will need to be rationed, at least in some places. I do not propose any particular ideal rationing scheme but caution strongly against adopting a position that Professor Bagenstos advocated this past spring, rejecting rationing on the basis of patient life expectancy simply because life expectancy based rationing might threaten the factual interests of those with disabilities and might conceivably be implemented by those making judgments that were not simply inaccurate but grounded in biased, unacceptably discriminatory intuitions that some decision …


Biological Threats Are National Security Risks: Why Covid-19 Should Be A Wake Up Call For Policy Makers, Rep. Eric M. Swalwell, R. Kyle Alagood Jan 2021

Biological Threats Are National Security Risks: Why Covid-19 Should Be A Wake Up Call For Policy Makers, Rep. Eric M. Swalwell, R. Kyle Alagood

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

A national security strategy is the “nation’s plan for the coordinated use of all the instruments of state power—nonmilitary as well as military—to pursue objectives that defend and advance its national interest.” Perhaps the most straightforward national security objective is to protect the country from foreign invasion, but national security involves other objectives that aim to protect people in the United States as well as their values. For example, protecting U.S. elections from foreign interference is a security objective that advances the nation’s interest in democratic governance. The outbreak of a highly contagious disease like COVID‑19 strikes at the core …


Profiteering Off Public Health Crises: The Viable Cure For Congressional Insider Trading, Charles L. Slamowitz Jul 2020

Profiteering Off Public Health Crises: The Viable Cure For Congressional Insider Trading, Charles L. Slamowitz

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

This article takes an approachable, forward-thinking, and academic dive into congressional insider trading in the wake of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. After a confidential briefing by the Senate Health Committee warned of COVID-19, massive stock sell-offs by members of Congress and their spouses suddenly ensued. Some senators even publicly disparaged COVID-19’s viral effects while their own shares were being offloaded. By the time the American people were made aware of its dangers, vast investment holdings by congressional insiders had already been sold. Shockingly, it is unclear if congressional insiders trading on confidential coronavirus information are actually breaking the law. Congress …


Covid-19 And The Conundrum Of Mask Requirements, Robert Gatter, Seema Mohapatra May 2020

Covid-19 And The Conundrum Of Mask Requirements, Robert Gatter, Seema Mohapatra

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

As states begin to loosen their COVID-19 restrictions, public debate is underway about what public health measures are appropriate. Many states have some form of mask-wearing orders to prevent the spread of COVID-19 infection. Public health guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization has conflicted. From a public health point of view, it is not clear what the right answer is. In the absence of directives, individuals are also making their own choices about mask use. At a time when public health measures, like shelter-in-place orders and social distancing, are being used to …


Covid-19 And The Provisional Licensing Of Qualified Medical School Graduates As Physicians, Paul J. Larkin Jr. Apr 2020

Covid-19 And The Provisional Licensing Of Qualified Medical School Graduates As Physicians, Paul J. Larkin Jr.

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

Each level of government has its own peculiar responsibilities to address the COVID-19 pandemic. The states are responsible for licensing physicians who can treat the affected people. Each year, a large number of American and foreign medical school graduates do not find a residency position in the United States. Medical school graduates who have passed the qualifying examination have acquired a considerable amount of education and training during their medical studies, far more than physician assistants, nurses, military corpsmen and medics, and civilian paramedics or emergency medical technicians. They comprise a pool of talent that could be immensely useful in …