The US Supreme Court Monday rejected a request to block a COVID-19 vaccine mandate being implemented by Mass General Brigham, a large Massachusetts hospital system. The employees of Mass General Brigham made the request last week following the hospital’s refusal to grant employees individual exemptions, both religious and medical, to the hospital system’s COVID-19 vaccine [...]

A federal district court in Missouri Monday issued a preliminary injunction halting the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for health care workers in 10 states. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued an interim final rule on November 5 revising the requirements Medicare- and Medicaid-certified providers have to meet in order to continue to [...]

Voters in Switzerland approved Sunday the government’s new COVID-19 measures in a referendum. In September 2020, the Swiss Parliament passed the COVID-19 Act to respond to the global medical crisis and protect the Swiss economy. In March 2021, Parliament altered the Act to include contact tracing, government-supported testing, and “expanded financial support to those affected by [...]

Austrian Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg announced in a press conference Friday that COVID-19 vaccination will become mandatory for everyone beginning February 1, 2022. As the fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic hits Western Europe, Austria is the first country to make COVID-19 vaccination mandatory.  Austria is one of the top four countries to have the highest [...]

Law students and lawyers in Afghanistan are filing reports with JURIST on the situation there after the Taliban takeover. Here, a Staff Correspondent for JURIST in Kabul offers his observations on the rising incapacity of local health centers, stalling of international assistance to tackle the COVID-19 crisis and the lack of a transparent discussion on [...]

“A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems that it creates is a decadent civilization.” Aimé Césaire wrote this in his critique of colonialism. Close examination of the legacy of colonialism helps explain the disparate impact of the current healthcare crisis based on race and class. The sick and dying in the US are [...]

In a time where people are getting seriously ill and dying (and not from a zombie apocalypse), society is faced with the moral question of whether we should release individuals from jails so that we can protect them from contracting, and dying from, COVID-19. It is no secret that jails are a hotspot for COVID-19 [...]

Members of Pennsylvania’s most vulnerable communities are at risk of losing access to essential legal services in the face of the unprecedented public health crisis, economic turmoil, and social disruption brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Graduating law students could help fill this growing need, but it is unclear whether we will be given the [...]

The novel coronavirus has disrupted the lives of billions globally. In the United States, as Americans shelter in place to stop the spread of COVID-19, so too stop the “normal” functions of the country. Americans are being laid off and filing for unemployment benefits at the highest levels ever recorded. Nearly 40,000 people who seek [...]

The coronavirus pandemic has created a cascade of horrible effects. As of April 10, there have been half a million cases and 18,000 deaths in the United States (1.5 million cases and over 100,000 deaths worldwide). The pandemic has also created widespread economic hardship, with 17 million Americans newly unemployed within the past three weeks. And [...]