The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enduring effect across the entire spectrum of law and policy, in areas ranging from health equity and racial justice, to constitutional law, the law of prisons, federal benefit programs, election law, and much more. This collection provides a critical reflection on what changes the pandemic has already introduced and what its legacy may be. Chapters evaluate how healthcare and government institutions have succeeded and failed during this global “stress test,” and explore how the United States and the world will move forward to ensure we are better prepared for future pandemics. This timely volume identifies the right questions to ask as we take stock of pandemic realities and provides guidance for the many stakeholders of COVID-19’s legal legacy. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This chapter analyses the phenomenon of vaccine tourism and seeks to answer that question. Section I situates vaccine tourism in the larger phenomenon of medical tourism and describes what is undesirable about it. Section II seeks to answer the question of when a state should try to prevent international vaccine tourism head-on, arguing that states should adopt a communitarian conception of who qualifies that is tied to the purpose of the good in question. For vaccines, such a conception makes it appropriate for states to prohibit “tourists” from coming to a state such as Florida from abroad for the purpose of getting vaccinated. At the same time, this rationale does not justify excluding undocumented persons or even those who are not permanent residents but have substantial ties to the community, such as part-time residents. Section III considers objections to the argument and briefly highlights some adjacent issues such as whether interstate vaccine tourism is different from international vaccine tourism in the ethical analysis. Throughout this chapter, I use the state of Florida in the United States as my “home state” and “home country” for ease of exposition, but I mean the arguments I offer to be more generally applicable.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enduring effect across the entire spectrum of law and policy, in areas ranging from health equity and racial justice, to constitutional law, the law of prisons, federal benefit programs, election law, and much more. This collection provides a critical reflection on what changes the pandemic has already introduced and what its legacy may be. Chapters evaluate how healthcare and government institutions have succeeded and failed during this global “stress test,” and explore how the United States and the world will move forward to ensure we are better prepared for future pandemics. This timely volume identifies the right questions to ask as we take stock of pandemic realities and provides guidance for the many stakeholders of COVID-19’s legal legacy. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted that leveraging medical big data can help to better predict and control outbreaks from the outset. However, there are still challenges to overcome in the 21st century to efficiently use medical big data, promote innovation and public health activities and adequately protect individuals’ privacy. The metaphor that property is a “bundle of sticks” applies equally to medical big data. Understanding medical big data in this way raises a number of questions, including: Who has the right to make money off its buying and selling, or is it inalienable? When does medical big data become sufficiently stripped of identifiers that the rights of an individual concerning the data disappear? How have different regimes such as the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act in the US answered these questions differently? In this chapter, we will discuss three topics: (1) privacy and data sharing, (2) informed consent, and (3) ownership.