Podcast Looks at Public Health System on 5th Anniversary of Pandemic
Podcast Looks at Public Health System on 5th Anniversary of Pandemic
This week marks the fifth anniversary of COVID being declared a global pandemic. SHP's Michelle Mello joins the Science Quickly podcast for Scientific American.
Fonda Mwangi, producer of Scientific American’s Science Quickly podcast, brought together several public health experts to examine the U.S. public health system today and what lessons we have learned since the pandemic was declared five years ago.
She asked SHP’s Michelle Mello, JD, PhD, how public health legal powers have changed since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020.
“There was a feeling that there were not enough guardrails around the exercise of public health legal powers during COVID,” said Mello, a professor of health policy and of law. “And that feeling, you know, has a basis in many people’s reality, which was that they were subject to very burdensome health orders for a very long period of time without a lot of explanation from health officials and by health officials who are not democratically accountable. So that kind of sowed the seed for people to feel like a correction was necessary.”
Mwangi asked Mello how legislative changes have impacted public health powers in the last few years.
“What’s unusual about lawmaking in the latter half of the COVID pandemic is that even though we mostly think about law as facilitating public health promotion, in this case, many states use their lawmaking powers to try to restrict the ability of the executive branch to take actions to protect public health during health emergencies, including but not limiting to pandemics."
“And then other states have done things that make it harder to close down schools or businesses. For example, there’s one state that has said, you can’t close a whole school. You can only close the building where a case of an infectious disease occurred.
“Just let that sink in for a moment. So now we have, without specifying what the disease is— could be any disease—if you have a measles outbreak or a new highly infectious pathogen, the only thing you can do is shut off the building where a kid who had that disease was for a period of time. The other students can’t be protected in any way by a school closure.”
