COVID-19 has exacerbated deeply divisive fissures of race, ethnicity and American political identity. There is a new intensity to the way that race, racism, and health risk have been jockeying for headlines. Given a global pandemic and a federal administration desperate to salvage its reelection prospects, questions of distributive justice—from vaccines to ventilators to triage—have become complicated by some very destructive ideas. This session will examine why it is imperative that terrible old ideas about race are not injected back into public policy practice in ways that threaten to create whole new regimes of discrimination, segregation and “race science.”

Speaker
Professor Patricia J. Williams

This session will take place as part of the 2020 Public Health Law Virtual Summit: COVID-19 Response and Recovery

About the 2020 Public Health Law Virtual Summit
COVID-19 Response and Recovery
The COVID-19 pandemic is challenging public health in unprecedented ways, and is exposing structural failures and health inequities that further exasperate the impact of the virus. As the nation continues to grapple with the ongoing pandemic, Northeastern Law's Center for Health Policy and Law has joined with the the  Network for Public Health and other public health law partners, to produce an expansive report, Pandemic Policymaking: Assessing Legal Responses to COVID-19, that includes critical analyses and recommendations from national experts convened to assess the U.S. policy response to the crisis to date. Many of these experts will present their key findings at this virtual Summit, and propose paths forward to more effective and equitable response and recovery efforts.