194.
John Hogan, Michael Howlett, Mary Murphy,
Re-thinking the coronavirus pandemic as a policy punctuation: COVID-19 as a path-clearing policy accelerator, 2022.01.10,
https://academic.oup.com/policyandsociety/article/41/1/40/6503294?searchresult=1 .
This article examines the evolution of our understanding of how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted policy ideas and routines across a wide variety of sectors of government activity. Did policy ideas and routines transform as a result of the pandemic or were they merely a continuation of the status quo ante? If they did transform, are the transformations temporary in nature or likely to lead to significant, deep and permanent reform to existing policy paths and trajectories? As this article sets out, the literature on policy punctuations has evolved and helps us understand the impact of COVID-19 on policy-making but tends to conflate several distinct aspects of path trajectories and deviations under the general concept of “critical junctures” which muddy reflections and findings.
193.
Althaf Marsoof,
The Disposal of COVID-19 Dead Bodies: Impact of Sri Lanka’s Response on Fundamental Rights, 2022.03.12,
https://academic.oup.com/jhrp/article/13/3/669/6547324?searchresult=1 .
In early 2020, the Government of Sri Lanka decided that all bodies of individuals who had (or were suspected to have) died of COVID-19 should be disposed of by cremation alone. Although this decision appears to be neutral and does not give rise to de jure discrimination, as a matter of fact, it has significantly impacted the religious rights of the Muslim community in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan Government’s decision to adopt a cremation-only policy interfered with the right of all Sri Lankan Muslims to manifest their religion or belief as guaranteed by the 1978 Constitution of Sri Lanka. The objective of this article is to consider the extent to which the aforementioned decisions of the Sri Lankan Government are consistent with the fundamental rights framework of the country’s Constitution.
192.
Mark Leon Goldberg,
These Lessons from COVID Can Help The World Prevent the Next Pandemic. 2022.5.30 ,
https://www.undispatch.com/these-lessons-from-covid-can-help-us-prevent-the-next-pandemic-dr-joanne-liu/ .
This article presents world leaders need to be approaching pandemic preparedness and response as if it were a potentially existential threat to humanity, on par with a nuclear catastrophe. This requires far greater levels of political attention than it currently receives.
191.
Veerle Buffel, Sarah Van de Velde, etc.,
Depressive symptoms in higher education students during the COVID-19 pandemic: the role of containment measures, 2022.03.15,
https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/advance-article/doi/10.1093/eurpub/ckac026/6548801?searchresult=1 .
Students are a vulnerable group for the indirect impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly their mental health. This paper examined the cross-national variation in students' depressive symptoms and whether this can be related to the various protective measures implemented in response to the initial stage of the COVID-19 outbreak. Our findings raise concerns about the potential adverse effects of existing containment measures (especially the closure of schools and workplaces and stay-at-home restrictions) on students' mental health.
190.
Gabriel Gregory, Lin Zhu, etc.,
Learning from the pandemic: mortality trends and seasonality of deaths in Australia in 2020, 2022.03.15,
https://academic.oup.com/ije/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ije/dyac032/6547421?searchresult=1 .
This article aim to assess whether the observed numbers and seasonality of deaths in Australia during 2020 differed from expected trends based on 2015–19 data. The conclusion is that the observed reductions in respiratory and dementia deaths and the reduced seasonality in ischaemic heart disease deaths may reflect reductions in circulating respiratory (non-SARS-CoV-2) pathogens resulting from the public health measures taken in 2020. The observed increase in diabetes deaths is unexplained and merits further study.
189.
Jonathan Pugh, Dominic Wilkinson, etc.,
Vaccine suspension, risk, and precaution in a pandemic, 2022.03.16,,
https://academic.oup.com/jlb/article/9/1/lsab036/6549442?searchresult=1 .
In early 2021, cases of rare adverse events were observed in individuals who had received the Astra Zeneca COVID-19 vaccine. Countries around the world differed radically in their policy responses to these observations. In this paper, we outline the ethical justification for different policy approaches for managing the emerging risks of novel vaccines in a pandemic. We begin by detailing the precautionary approach that some countries adopted, and distinguishing ethical questions regarding the management of known and unknown risks. We go on to outline the harms of adopting a highly precautionary approach in a pandemic context, and explain why an appropriate policy approach should accommodate the benefits as well as the risks of vaccination. In the final section, we outline three policy approaches that can accommodate the different benefits of vaccination, whilst taking into account the harms of precaution. Whilst we do not set out to defend one particular policy approach, we explain how different moral theories lend different degrees of support to each of these different approaches. Our analysis elucidates how fundamental value conflicts in public health ethics played out on the global stage of vaccine policy.
188.
Bishoy Louis Zaki, Francesco Nicoli, etc.,
Contagious inequality: economic disparities and excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic, 2022.03.17,
https://academic.oup.com/policyandsociety/advance-article/doi/10.1093/polsoc/puac011/6550136?searchresult=1 .
The COVID-19 pandemic has emphasized the need to consider multiple and often novel perspectives on contemporary policymaking in the context of technically complex, ambiguous, and large-scale crises. In this article, we focus on exploring a territory that remains relatively unchartered on a large scale, namely the relationship between economic inequalities and excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic, using a dataset of 25 European countries spanning 300 regions. Our findings reveal two pathways by which economic asymmetries and inequalities can observably influence excess mortality: labor market structures and income inequalities. We leverage our findings to offer recommendations for policymakers toward a more deliberate consideration of the multidimensionality of technically complex, large-scale crises with a high degree of societal embeddedness. These findings also urge future scholarship to utilize a range of parameters and indicators for better understanding the relationship between cues and outcomes in such complex settings.
187.
Dong Jin Kim, Andrew Ikhyun Kim,
Global health diplomacy and North Korea in the COVID-19 era, 2022.03.21,
https://academic.oup.com/ia/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ia/iiac048/6550824?searchresult=1 .
This article presents global health diplomacy as a conceptual framework that could overcome the dichotomy of humanitarianism and international politics, using health aid to North Korea during COVID-19 as a case-study. Health is a critical component of human dignity and can be a normative motivation for cooperation beyond sovereign borders. However, health is also an important element of national interest and can be a strategic motivation for transnational cooperation. The overlap between the moral and rational spaces in global health diplomacy demonstrates how COVID-19 assistance to North Korea's vulnerable population is in the enlightened self-interest of donors to prevent resurgences of new COVID-19 variants. Moreover, this framework imbues all parties, including aid recipients such as North Korea, with the global cooperative responsibility to address health. In this sense, global health diplomacy can reframe the tensions between humanitarianism and politics, morality and rationality, and cosmopolitanism and nationalism, from antithetical to complementary.
186.
Berdien B E van der Donk,
Should Critique on Governmental Policy Regarding Covid-19 Be Tolerated on Online Platforms? An Analysis of Recent Case-Law in the Netherlands, 2022.02.15,
https://academic.oup.com/jhrp/article/13/2/426/6528517 .
This policy and practice note describes and discusses two recent decisions by the District Court in Amsterdam regarding the applicability of YouTube’s and Facebook’s Community Guidelines on Covid-19 misinformation. The decisions illustrate the tense intersection between, on the one hand, the freedom to express criticism of the government’s policy for fighting the outbreak of Covid-19 in the Netherlands, and on the other hand, the prevention of (dis)information with the potential to harm public health. Analyzing the divergence in these two decisions’ argumentation will show that its roots can be traced back to a different valuation of the role of the online platforms regarding the dissemination of speech. A debate on this divergence is needed to prevent inconsistency in future decisions and to contribute to the broader discussion on content regulation in the European Union.
185.
Thiago Guimarães Moraes, etc.,
COVID-19 pandemic: anonymisation as a technical solution for transparency, privacy, and data protection, 2021.04.22,
https://academic.oup.com/idpl/article/11/1/32/6246144?searchresult=1 .
The article intends to answer the question: which technical approach could be implemented to publish transparent data on COVID-19 infections while respecting the privacy of individuals?Privacy by Design is brought as a key concept to harmonization between these topics. It is possible to conclude that while transparency databases are essential when facing a pandemic outbreak, they must respect the rights to privacy and data protection.The article presents anonymization as a set of four strategies which aims to provide unlinkability to a given dataset: (i) to minimize, (ii) to separate, (iii) to abstract, and (iv) to obfuscate.While anonymization is a technical solution that may help to bring balance between open data transparency and privacy, it needs to be complemented by organizational measures, such as access control, privacy policies, and data protection impact assessments.
Beijing Interest Group on Global Health and Global Governance
Contact: secretary@bigghgg.cn