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Honored to have worked with @sbagen on this important project. https://twitter.com/sbagen/status/1285659464146866176
The personal responsibility ethos that has driven the US response to the coronavirus pandemic has been ineffective, atomizing, and unjust.
Fundamentally individualistic employment and antidiscrimination laws have undermined—rather than supported—disempowered workers’ ability to protect themselves and others.
The law has failed to protect people who work in congregate institutions (nursing homes, prisons, jails, detention facilities, factories, & warehouses . . . and soon schools) and thus has failed to protect the broader communities w/ which these institutions are interconnected.
Together, public health and employment laws have put the onus on individuals to adopt protective behaviors without providing them with the supports, accommodations, and protections they need to do so.
We ID three key areas for reform to ensure more effective and just pandemic response—for this pandemic and the next one—built on a core commitment to social solidarity in public health law and employment and antidiscrimination law...
First, public health law should prioritize supports that create the conditions required mitigate the spread of infection over punitive measures targeting individuals.
Second, employment law should protect workers from infection, including through workplace safety, privacy, and antidiscrimination protections that enable them to adopt protective health behaviors.
Third, for those for whom returning to work would be esp. unsafe—b/c their employers maintain particularly dangerous conditions or b/c of underlying health conditions—employment law should remove any obligation to return to work while the special dangers of the pandemic persist.
We show that a broad vision of public health law that encompasses action on the social determinants of health in “non-health” sectors such as employment and antidiscrimination law is not only tenable, but essential. #SDoH
The US experience w/ COVID-19 puts the final nail in the coffin of the argument that public health law should be confined to the “old” public health, w/ cramped focus on microbial & behavioral interventions, & decline to address the social-ecological drivers of health inequities.
