The Week in Health Law TWIHL

Sarah de Guia of ChangeLab Solutions is joined by Sharon Terman from legal aid at work, and Danilo Trisi from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The participants have a broad-ranging discussion about the safety net, what the Biden administration has achieved so far, and what are some of the priorities that remain.

Professor Wendy Parmet, Northeastern University School of Law, Lori Tremmel Freeman is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), and Jill Krueger, the director of the Network for Public Law’s Northern Region Office discuss the various attempts to restrict, reallocate, or otherwise diminish traditional public health powers and the implications. The panelists discuss recent state laws reducing public health emergency powers, ALEC, & where things stand now.

I am joined by Professor Anniek de Ruijter Professor of European Law at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Professor Andrew Noymer, University of California, Irvine, and Professor Nils Hoppe, the Faculty for Humanities and Social Sciences at Leibniz University Hannover. Our discussion begins with the lessons learned or not learned in various countries and regions and then explores issues such as vaccine intellectual property and vaccine passports. BTW, Anniek has an interesting new paper on EU health solidarity, Sharon Baute & Anniek de Ruijter (2021) EU health solidarity in times of crisis: explaining public preferences towards EU risk pooling for medicines, Journal of European Public Policy, DOI: 10.1080/13501763.2021.1936129

Jorge Contreras, Professor of Law, University of Utah, Brook Baker, Professor of Law, Northeastern University, and Ana Santos Rutschman, Professor of Law, Saint Louis University discuss vaccine access, What are the technical obstacles to increasing vaccine access? How are Intellectual Property, primarily patent and trade secret, laws restricting access and keeping prices high?

Professor Scott Burris, Temple Law School, Professor Wendy Parmet, Northeastern University School of Law, and Professor Lance Gable, Wayne State College of Law discuss the “shadow docket,” the hundreds of cases (emergency orders and summary decisions) decided by the Supreme Court each year outside of its far smaller, normal or merits docket. Specifically, the discussion focuses on how public health decisions, such as (particularly free exercise) challenges to government mitigation mandates have been handled by the shadow docket, the possible deprecation of Jacobson deference and the implications for public health powers and law. As always for more information about public health law and the pandemic see Vol.2 of our COVID-19 Policy Playbook, Legal Recommendations for a Safer, More Equitable Future.

Scott Burris, Professor of Law, Temple Law School, Christopher Robertson, Professor of Law, Boston University School of Law, and Gene Matthews, Network for Public Health Law discuss the current proposals to increase the independence of public health agencies such as the CDC. Political manipulation and lack of leadership have seriously jeopardized public trust and even agency competence. Topics include prior examples of the politicization of public health, policymakers failing to understand social and behavioral science, and how an independent agency could be protected and funded. For more on this topic see The “Legal Epidemiology” of Pandemic Control and Designing an Independent Public Health Agency. See also Vol.2 of our COVID-19 Policy Playbook, Legal Recommendations for a Safer, More Equitable Future.