Centering Law In Public Health Education

Health Affairs April 12, 2024
Jalayne J. Arias, Elizabeth Tobin-Tyler, Jami Crespo, Ross D. Silverman, Daniel Goldberg, Benjamin Mason Meier, Micah L. Berman

The COVID-19 pandemic raised awareness of the law’s power to impact population health, positively and negatively. COVID-19 revealed how longstanding social inequities—structured by law—can quickly translate into inequities in infections and deaths when a pandemic strikes. In the COVID-19 response, public resistance to public health interventions and conflict between different branches and levels of government undermined the long-standing legal foundations of public health authority. Moreover, the global scope of the health threat raised an imperative to understand connections among local, state, national, and global health law. Throughout the pandemic, law was a critical tool for implementing population-level prevention strategies, empowering entities that implement and enforce such strategies, providing financial protection for vulnerable individuals, and accelerating approval and distribution of vaccines...

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