By Gregory M. Lipper After nearly four years fighting about whether and when employers may exclude contraceptive coverage from employee health plans (and even block others from providing that coverage), it’s perhaps refreshing to see less controversial cases. And few healthcare-exemption cases are less controversial than those brought by parents who object to vaccinating their…
By Ross D. Silverman This summer, California’s strict new childhood immunization law, barring all exemptions except those needed for medical purposes, went into effect for public and private schools, preschools, and day cares. This law was passed as a response to the highly-publicized 2014-2015 multi-state measles outbreak that originated at Disneyland, and also in response…
By Christopher Robertson Whether it is Ebola, H1N1, the season flu, or the next nasty bug that we cannot yet even imagine, if we wanted to efficiently spread the disease, one could not do much better than packing several hundred people into a cylinder for a few hours, while they eat, drink, defecate, and urinate.…
By Timo Minssen Please find below my welcome speech at last-weeks mini-symposium on “Legal dimensions of Big Data in the Health and Life Sciences – From Intellectual Property Rights and Global Pandemics to Privacy and Ethics at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH). The event was organized by our Global Genes –Local Concerns project, with support from the UCPH Excellence Programme for Interdisciplinary Research.…
By Timo Minssen Dear readers and colleagues, I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy, healthy and peaceful year 2016. Reaching the end of 2015, I cannot stop thinking about the year that has passed. Being a native German, living in Sweden and commuting every week over the bridge to Copenhagen in Denmark…
By George Maliha As flu season begins, we are bombarded by ubiquitous reminders to get our flu shot. So, it is a good opportunity to reflect on how we provide vaccines to our fellow citizens 65 and older. By law, Medicare Part B covers 4 preventive vaccines (flu, two pneumococcal, and hepatitis B for medium-to…
By Ross D. Silverman This week, the Supreme Court appropriately declined to hear an appeal of a 2nd Circuit decision upholding the right of the state to require vaccination as a condition of enrollment in public schools, and to exclude exempted children from attending school during an infectious disease outbreak. Tony Yang and I wrote…
By Arthur Caplan Bill of Health Contributor Arthur Caplan has a new piece up on bioethics.net. From the piece: Plenty of pundits are analyzing the Wednesday night GOP debate in terms of who won and who lost. They are missing the point. There was a huge loser in the back and forth among the contenders—the…
By Michelle Meyer I’ve started writing for Forbes as a regular contributor. My first piece, Carly Fiorina Says Her Views On Vaccines Are Unremarkable; For Better Or Worse, She’s Right, analyzes GOP presidential candidate Carly Fiorina’s recent ad hoc remarks on the relative rights of parents and schools with respect to vaccinations and to some…
By Arthur Caplan A new opinion piece by contributor Art Caplan on NBC News: California has decided one large epidemic scare is enough. After the frightening outbreak of measles that started at Disneyland and sickened 147 people, Californians rejected the irrationality of anti-vaccine zealots and decided to restrict parents’ ability to exempt their children from…
