New Hastings Series: Securing Health in a Troubled Time
The Hastings Center will host “Health, Racism, and This Moment in Time,” the first in a Hastings Conversations discussion series, Securing Health in a Troubled Time. Disparate health outcomes for people of color and the poor have been recognized for decades, but the pandemic has made them inescapably visible. Visible, too, is the racism that accounts for the cruelty witnessed, as millions watched George Floyd’s murder. We know the social causes of these inequities and the policies that could address them. Yet as a nation we have failed to act. Now, we face three simultaneous crises–in public health, in the economy, and in the American relationship to race. Can we seize the moment to advance health and well-being for all of us? What’s at stake if we don’t? What are the best ways to proceed?
The first event will feature:
Richard Besser, president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and former acting director for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Herminia Palacio, president of the Guttmacher Institute and former deputy mayor for Health and Human Services for the City of New York
Mildred Z. Solomon, president of The Hastings Center
The event will take place online on Thursday, August 13, from 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. Eastern time.
Learn more and register here.
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Hastings President: CDC's Call to Open Schools is "Political and Unethical"
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a statement last week recommending that schools re-open during the pandemic. Hastings Center President Mildred Z. Solomon said the recommendation was “based on politics, not science.” She added: “It is unethical to suggest reopening schools without creating the conditions for them to do so safely. CDC Director Robert R. Redfield must lead or resign. If the director of the CDC wants schools to open, even in places with high community transmission, he should be offering the nation a plan for widespread, reliable, and fast-results testing; large-scale contact tracing; and universal precautions such as masks. But these precautions are not in place, and CDC’s world-renowned expertise is nowhere to be found. We can and should open schools but only if we double down on these important measures.” Read more.
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Inequality, Vulnerability, and Justice: Learning from the Pandemic
There are stark disparities in vulnerability to coronavirus infection and illness by race, ethnicity, income, immigration status, and neighborhood in the United States. Hastings Center research scholar Nancy Berlinger will moderate a webinar, sponsored by the Empire State Bioethics Consortium, that will offer perspectives from Texas, Colorado, and New York on learning from Covid-19 to work toward justice in health, focusing on Black health, immigrant health, and the role of health systems. The event will take place on Wednesday, August 5, from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. Eastern time.
Learn more and register here.
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In the Media: Ethics of Re-Opening Businesses, Dining Out
Temperature-taking, questionnaires, “sanitizing stations,” and, of course, masks are part of the new business as usual as companies aim to re-open safely. Hastings Center research scholar Nancy Berlinger discussed the ethics of getting people back to work in an interview with Newsday. “The big ethical challenge is how should employers create and support safe work conditions during a continuing health emergency,” she said. Read the Newsday article.
Is dining out the right thing to do—because it supports restaurants and keeps people employed? Or is it wrong because it risks spreading the coronavirus? “There’s no question that dining in restaurants, outdoors or indoors, increases the risk of exposure,” said Hastings Center research scholar Michael Gusmano in an interview with the Times Herald-Record in New Jersey. But he said he finds fault not with restaurant goers but with how we treat low-wage workers. Read the Times Herald-Record article.
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