News & Insights

Several universities across the U.S. have announced plans to require students to receive a COVID-19 vaccination before heading back to campus for the fall semester. Brown, Cornell, Duke, Northeastern, and Rutgers are among them. Some institutions of higher learning, like Virginia Tech, have determined that they cannot require vaccinations because of the vaccine’s Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) status, but this stance rests on shaky legal grounds.

The digital divide continues to prevent many households and students from accessing online services that can support healthy outcomes. However, federal lawmakers and agencies have recently taken short-term steps to address the largest source of the digital divide—affordability—and some longer-term federal fixes to the digital divide are on the horizon. Permanent federal, state, and local policies and programs must prioritize affordable broadband service for all households and provide regulatory oversight to ensure the digital divide does not exacerbate health inequities now, and in the future.

Some of the public health law and policy issues in the headlines in recent weeks include the Biden administration’s efforts to implement a national COVID-19 testing strategy; the city of Sante Fe’s innovative approach to addressing homelessness; a House bill that would significantly expand voting rights; a Colorado bill providing added protections for public health workers; vaccine mandates for health care workers; a new law in California that expands access to mental health and addiction treatments; and COVID-19 vaccination registration and information websites that violate disability laws.

President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARPA) into law on March 11, 2021. While most media attention focused on its headline provisions, including $1,400 stimulus checks for many individuals, $350 billion in aid to state, local, and tribal governments, and expansions in the Earned Income Tax Credit and child tax credit, the Act also contains historic assistance for harm reduction programs.

From the inception of the Network for Public Health Law in September 2010, emergency legal preparedness and response issues have been a significant component of its mission and objectives. By the end of the decade, public health emergency laws and policies would completely dominate all of society globally.

Community lawyering, also called movement lawyering, is an approach to social justice which de-centers lawyers as the linchpins of change and instead focuses on empowering communities and movements. The updated 2020 10 Essential Public Health Services include core values and activities that are also reflected in community lawyering. Among these priorities are communicating to inform and educate, mobilizing communities and partnerships, supporting laws to advance health equity, and ensuring equitable access to services needed for health.

In honor of Women's History Month, women in the Network’s Health Equity Working Group have highlighted legal or policy issues affecting women’s health that they see as critically important. The topics addressed cover: economic stability and well-being, pregnancy discrimination, period poverty, and maternal depression. The law and policy solutions discussed here have the potential to improve life for women and girls for generations to come.

As the nation continues to grapple with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the Network has joined with public health law partners to produce a report that includes critical analyses and recommendations from 50 national experts convened to assess the U.S. policy response to the crisis to date.

Since the Biden Administration released its plan to advance racial equity in the United States, there has been significant pushback against the idea that systemic racism even exists. This questioning is not new, but it has taken on a renewed fervor as state and local governments, professional associations, hospitals and health systems, and corporations have made public commitments to addressing systemic racism and treating racism as a public health crisis.

The rise in anti-Asian sentiment is closely intertwined with the COVID-19 pandemic, and the xenophobic language used by some government leaders has further fueled discrimination and hate crimes against Asian communities in America. The violent, physical attacks on people of Asian descent around the country, and the horrific shootings in Atlanta — which the Asian American and Pacific Islander community and many other communities believe was racially motivated — are glaring examples of why racism is a public health crisis.

As of February 20, 2021, President Biden had issued 34 Executive Orders (EOs), several of which are intended to protect the public’s health. While the majority of the EOs use the power of the federal government to protect Americans from the COVID-19 pandemic, there are also measures designed to strengthen our public health infrastructure more broadly, and specifically relate to the impact of climate change.

As efforts are made to examine and evaluate the response to COVID-19 both generally and within public health specifically, states are taking a variety of approaches. Legislators in some states are seeking to clarify and bolster emergency powers and public health authority, while legislators in other states are seeking to curtail them sharply. The process unfolding in state legislatures has the potential to affect substantive developments in emergency powers and public health authority for years to come and should therefore be done only after careful consideration and discussion.