Endogenous public health responses include the individual behaviours, community-based organizational responses, and informal rules that resolve economic problems during public health crises. We explore the relevance of endogenous responses in Orthodox Jewish communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyse Orthodox newspapers in New York City and find that (a) rabbis advised their communities on how to stay healthy and observant to their religious beliefs; (b) rabbinical councils and advisory boards provided private, public health guidance; (c) private, Jewish ambulatory services provided religiously sensitive healthcare; (d) Orthodox Jewish schools privately provided public health services; and (e) community members altered religious rules, rituals, and traditions to mitigate the spread of the virus. While these responses did not occur seamlessly or without conflict, the Orthodox community worked diligently to provide public health services to remain healthy while also observing religious traditions. Our paper provides shows how communities develop endogenous public health responses during crises.

Forty years into Botswana’s AIDS epidemic, amidst persistently low rates of marriage across southern Africa, an unexpected uptick in weddings appears to be afoot. Young people orphaned in the worst years of the epidemic are crafting creative paths to marriage where—and perhaps because—their parents could not. Taking the lead of a pastor’s assertion that the wife is mother of her husband, I suggest these conjugal creativities turn on an understanding of marriage as an intergenerational relationship. Casting marriage in intergenerational terms is an act of ethical (re)imagination that creates experimental possibilities for reworking personhood, pasts, and futures in ways that respond closely to the specific crises and loss the AIDS epidemic brought to Botswana. This experimentation is highly unpredictable and may reproduce the crisis and loss to which it responds; the multivalences of marriage-as-motherhood can be sources of failure and violence, as well as innovation and life. But it also recuperates and reorients intergenerational relationships, retrospectively and prospectively, regenerating persons and relations, in time. While different crises might invite different sorts of ethical re-imagination, marriage gives us a novel perspective on how people live with, and through, times of crisis. And marriage emerges as a crucial if often overlooked practice by which social change is not only managed but sought and produced.

On June 1, 2024, the World Health Assembly reached consensus on a package of amendments to the 2005 International Health Regulations (IHR). These amendments follow nearly two decades of implementation and an intensive multilateral process prompted by the global struggle against COVID-19. This article critically examines whether the amended IHR reflect lessons learned from the pandemic, potentially ushering in a new era for global health law in pandemic preparedness and response, or if they deflect attention from the need for deeper structural reforms. While the IHR remain the only near-universal legal framework for preventing and addressing the international spread of disease, these amendments emphasize equity and solidarity, and potentially shift the IHR from a technical instrument to one focusing on inherently political issues. This analysis examines key IHR amendments and their implications for the future of global health law, particularly in the context of equity, financing, and implementation.

Human rights offer to ground global health law in equity and justice. Human rights norms, advocacy, and strategies have proven successes in challenging private and public inequities and in realizing more equitable domestic and global health governance. However, mobilizing human rights within global health law faces enormous political, economic, technological, and epidemiological challenges, including from the corrosive health impacts of power, politics, and commerce. This article focuses on what human rights could bring to three major global health law challenges — health systems strengthening and universal health coverage, the commercial and economic determinants of health, and pandemic disease threats. We argue that human rights offer potentially powerful norms and strategies for achieving equity and justice in these and other key global health domains. The challenge for those working in human rights and global health law is to work nimbly, creatively, and courageously to strengthen the contribution of these instruments to health justice.

Although it is true that the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) situation has improved significantly around the world, especially after the implementation of mass vaccination campaigns, there is still a lack of consensus both in the literature and among health authorities and other stakeholders about the current epidemiological situation. This, in turn, has been intensified after the World Health Organization declared the end of the public health emergency of international concern related to COVID-19. In this context, worrying questions have arisen, including a rampant dissemination of scientific misinformation coupled with increased resistance to the implementation and/or revocation of appropriate public health measures. In response to these challenges and hoping to contribute to their mitigation, this article addresses current aspects about the epidemiological situation of COVID-19, discusses long COVID and its controversies, the intensification of scientific misinformation as well as considerations on related health surveillance, and recommendations for improving the existing situation.

The reprocessing of personal protective equipment that is only intended for single use has been brought into focus by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic, especially regarding respiratory masks.1–4

In this article, we examine the relationship between the World Health Organization International Health Regulations (IHR) and human rights and its implications for IHR reform, considering the evolution of human rights in the 2005 IHR, the role of human rights in IHR reforms and the implications of these reforms in key domains including equity and solidarity, medical countermeasures, core capacities, travel restrictions, vaccine certificates, social measures, accountability, and financing.

This essay considers how the fact that some morally innocent person is nevertheless a threat to others can bear on the permissibility of health policies that harm some to protect others. Two types of innocent threats are distinguished. In the case of abortion, it is argued that even if the embryo/fetus were a person, abortion could be permissible to protect a woman’s life, health, or bodily autonomy. Whether there nevertheless should be time limits on abortions and what surprising form such limits might take are also considered. In the case of pandemics, it is suggested that discussions of health policies should, but often do not, distinguish morally between innocent threats and their potential victims as well as between providing benefits to people and preventing harms to them. The essay also examines discussions of pandemics by health professionals that make use of the trolley problem, the doctrine of double effect, and related philosophical distinctions.

This article addresses the interstate differences in outcomes from the coronavirus disease COVID-19 pandemic by focusing on state capacity. State capacity refers to states’ ability to create and implement policy. We posit that states want to limit death and destruction within their borders. COVID-19 created an instance in which states had a shared, preferred outcome but had very different levels of success. Using a novel measure of state capacity that allows for subnational comparisons – and is independent of ideological political will – we show that states with greater capacity experienced fewer excess deaths during 2020 and more successfully distributed vaccines in early 2021. The findings are robust to various measures of partisanship, social capital, geography, and demographics. Our work bridges US state politics literature and comparative politics literature on state capacity, and it contributes to research on the politics of pandemics.

The need to maintain transport during a pandemic places transport workers at higher risk of infection and can have other effects on health and well-being. The aim of this study was to understand the current state of research on the impact of respiratory diseases on transport workers and to identify any existing evidence-based recommendations that can help mitigate the risks associated with these diseases in the transport industry. A scoping review was undertaken as per PRISMA guidelines. A search was conducted in English-language databases for peer-reviewed research articles. We reviewed research articles published over 20 years (2002–2022). We found 12540 articles, of which 39 deemed relevant, were analysed. The review highlighted the high risk of transport workers’ exposure to respiratory diseases during pandemics, exacerbated by structural inequalities including the significant number holding precarious/non-standard jobs. Increased financial strains led to poorer mental health outcomes and risks of detrimental behaviours for health. Economic measures implemented by governments were found to be insufficient in addressing these issues. The review found that transport is a significant transmission point for pandemics of respiratory diseases, and it suggests some remedies to best meet these challenges.