The Fordham Law International Law Journal discussed topical issues related to vaccine rules in a day-long symposium on February 18. Titled “Defining The New Normal: How Vaccinations are Shaping the Modern World,” the symposium brought together researchers and experts from inside and outside the Fordham Law community who spoke on panels related to the equitable distribution of vaccines, data privacy, and vaccine mandates in the workplace.
“I’m incredibly proud of our students for designing a timely symposium tackling these critical issues,” said Fordham Law Associate Dean Joseph Landau. “This topic of vaccinations couldn’t be more front and center in our world. It’s critical that we have experts to help us understand the hard questions that we’re dealing with now and that we will likely be dealing with for some time ahead.”
Notably, the symposium marked the 45th year of the Fordham International Law Journal. The journal has already produced three issues this year, with two others on the way—one about issues related to displaced persons and the other about vaccine access globally.
Vaccine Hesitancy and Misinformation
The opening panel of the symposium, titled “Vacci[nations]: How We Close the Global Vaccine Equity Gap” and moderated by Fordham Law Adjunct Professor and Novartis Senior Manager Wendy Luftig, discussed problems and strategies related to how vaccines are accessed and delivered.
Dr. Jennifer Nuzzo, associate professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a senior fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations, spoke about the trend towards vaccine hesitancy that she’s witnessed over her career.
“This is something that public health has been dealing with for quite some time. We’ve been seeing falling vaccination rates in this country and across the globe and increasing opposition to mandatory vaccines for routine immunizations, like measles, for instance,” Nuzzo said. “[But] I can tell you, this is nothing like I have ever seen at any other point in my career.”
Though the newness of the virus and of the vaccine technology is one aspect of the hesitancy, the problem runs deeper, Nuzzo said, and has been exacerbated by widespread misinformation. “I have seen all manner of people with false beliefs about COVID,” she continued, “[including] reasonable people, educated people, that otherwise you would think should know better, who have come to believe the wrong things. And I have only to conclude that it’s because we have an information environment that’s completely saturated with lies, where it is easier to find lies when you do your own research, than it is to find the truth.“
Vaccine Access and Supply
Garrett Wilkinson, a government relations & policy officer at Partners in Health, spoke about some of the obstacles facing vaccine access, including a lack of vaccine supply stemming from unnecessarily limited manufacturing capacity, which has slowed down the U.S.’s ability to provide vaccines to other countries.
“The U.S. has only donated about 400 million doses of vaccines globally—just one-third of our global targets—and hundreds and hundreds of millions of doses that the U.S. is supposed to donate haven’t even been produced yet,” said Wilkinson. “This is akin to us all in this room being in a burning house, and when we call the fire department for help, they say, ‘We have hundreds of thousands of gallons of water that we can give you to put out the fire, but we won’t give you that water until next year.’”
Jorge Contreras, Presidential Scholar and professor at University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law, brought up some of the issues of using patents at a global scale. Better global patent processes could help facilitate vaccine production, but the current system is not set up for it.
“The patent world is fractured,” said Contreras. “There are about 200 separate patent-issuing jurisdictions in the world, and they don’t have to talk to each other. We have some treaties, but they’re very minimal. It’s highly conceivable that there could be a global patent examination system. Are we close to that? No, we’re definitely not.”
At the end of the program, Luftig thanked the speakers and looked ahead at potential solutions on the horizon. ‘We have learned that the challenge of global vaccine equity implicates scientific issues such as overcoming distribution and vaccine skepticism, governmental issues such as distribution, financing and legal commitments, and legal issues such as patent and proprietary rights,’ Luftig said. ‘But as the saying goes, the first step in solving a problem is to face it. The comments of our panelists today have contributed to educating us about the complexities of these issues, so that we can start thinking about some solutions—and prepare for the next pandemic.”