IU McKinney professors contribute to assessment of U.S. response to COVID-19

United States policy response to COVID-19 has been dangerously lacking, according to a recent report authored partially by two Indianapolis law professors. The new report recommends steps to safeguard health as well as civil and human rights.

The report, Assessing Legal Responses to COVID-19, details the “widespread failure of the country’s leadership in planning and executing a cohesive, national response, and how the crisis exposed weaknesses in the nation’s health care and public health systems.” It also offers recommendations on how federal, state and local leaders can better respond to COVID-19 and future pandemics.

The assessment was authored by 50 top national experts, including Ross Silverman and Nicolas Terry, professors at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. Terry served on the report’s editorial committee.

“Judged by any metric the U.S. response to COVID-19 has been a historic failure,” Terry said in a news release. “Great attention has been justly paid to political failures and how science and public health have been politicized.”

Report proposals include how to strengthen executive leadership for a stronger emergency response; expand access to public health, health care and telehealth; fortify protections for workers; and implement a fair and humane immigration policy.

Expert assessments in the report also show that the country’s failure in its COVID-19 response in many ways has been a legal failure, Terry noted.

“The basic design of our health care system and its legal underpinnings have failed us in multiple ways,” he said. “And then there are the more detailed laws such as those dealing with housing and evictions, the protection of nursing home residents, worker protections, and so many more that have been revealed as inadequate or poorly implemented or both.”

Key findings in the report include:

• Ample legal authority has not been properly used in practice – evidence shows a massive failure of executive leadership and implementation at the federal level, and in many states and localities.
• Decades of pandemic preparation overemphasized documenting plans and failed to account for how severe budget cuts to public health, from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to state and local health departments, would drive outcomes. These budget cuts were combined with political interference that had a deleterious effect on the operational readiness of the nation’s local, state and federal health agencies.
• Legal responses have failed to prevent racial and economic disparities in the pandemic’s toll and in some cases aggravated them.

More than 100 recommendations for legal action in response to COVID-19 are provided in the report, including calls for urgent action as well as longer term changes that reflect the way the pandemic has exposed deeper problems in American law and policy.

Recommendations focus on key objectives including:

• Grounding legal measures in the best available science.
• Collecting and assessing accurate data.
• Improving and expanding access to health care, both now and post-pandemic.
• Increasing and maintaining funding for public health emergency preparedness through a dedicated public health emergency fund.
• Reforming the public health and health care systems to enable them to respond more effectively and equitably during a pandemic and reduce disparities.
• Addressing the affordability and availability of broadband service throughout the United States.

The report is sponsored by the de Beaumont Foundation and the American Public Health Association and produced by Public Health Law Watch in cooperation with the Hall Center for Law and Health at IU McKinney, the Center for Public Health Law Research at Temple University Beasley School of Law, the Center for Health Policy and Law at Northeastern University, Wayne State University Law School, the Network for Public Health Law and ChangeLab Solutions.