The Evolution of the Right to Health in the Shadow of COVID-19

• Published in: Health and human rights 2020-06, Vol.22 (1), p.375-378
• Main Author: FORMAN, LISA
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Access; Antiretroviral therapy; Betacoronavirus; Bioethics; Civilization; Clinical outcomes; Clinical standards; Constitutional courts; Contact tracing; Coronavirus Infections - epidemiology; Coronaviruses; COVID-19; Drugs; Graduate students; Health disparities; Health services; Human Rights; Humans; Interdisciplinary aspects; Law; Legitimacy; Mass media effects; Medical schools; National health insurance; Pandemics; Pneumonia, Viral - epidemiology; Policy making; Public health; Public health clinics; Radicalism; Right to Health; SARS-CoV-2; Social media; VIEWPOINT
• ISSN: 1079-0969; 2150-4113; 2150-4113

As a graduate student in the early 2000s coming to grips with the meaning and interpretation of the right to health, few publications had as great an impact on me as the Harvard Law School and Francois-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center’s 1993 “Interdisciplinary Discussion on Economic and Social Rights and the Right to Health.”[1] It captured a discussion between multiple heavy hitters of the field, including Jonathan Mann, then head of the FXB Center, Philip Alston, chair of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, Martha Minow, a Harvard Law School professor, Albie Sachs, soon to be a member of South Africa’s first Constitutional Court, and Paul Farmer, at that point an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. The discussion transformed my understanding of human rights from laws found in ‘black-letter’ texts and court judgments, to a far more socially-generated, dynamic model of norms and standards. My light-bulb moment came when Martha Minow quoted Judith Shklar’s insight that “civilization advances when what was perceived as misfortune is perceived as injustice.”[2] In a seemingly impossible fight to expand the right to health to include universal access to affordable antiretroviral medicines during a global pandemic, Shklar articulated the social and political processes necessary for a radical transformation to take place. That global access to antiretrovirals subsequently shifted so dramatically and rapidly deeply underscored for me, as a junior scholar, that global crises could transform both our conceptions of health rights and justice and material outcomes.It is poignant to revisit that insight in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. As I write in early April 2020, extraordinary lockdowns and isolation measures affecting billions of people worldwide are in place to stop the explosive spread of the corona virus. The scale and impact of these measures are such that health and human rights scholars will likely be exploring their legitimacy, necessity, duration, and proportionality for years to come. Some on social media are suggesting these steps show that for once policy-makers have placed health above the economy. But the rampant global spread of COVID-19 is likely a result of many governments’ reluctance to take the necessary steps at a far earlier stage, because they did not want to spook markets. Those steps would have included wide-spread testing, contact tracing, and more adequately preparing health care settings for COVID-19