In this JAMA Forum article by Stanford Health Policy's Michelle Mello, the professor of health policy and law writes that reports are mounting of pregnant patients being denied potentially lifesaving care in emergency departments.
Many high-income countries have rapidly pivoted from hard decisions about who may receive COVID-19 vaccines, due to shortages, to equally hard decisions about who must receive them. As lasting containment of COVID-19 remains elusive, many nations—from Costa Rica, to Austria, to Turkmenistan—are turning to vaccination mandates of various kinds. Mandates, however, are controversial in many countries. Austria's proposed mandate for adults, for example, provoked mass protests. Some objectors argue mandates represent undue encroachment on individual liberty. Some other objectors maintain that mandates will not be an effective policy for COVID-19 because many individuals will seek to evade them, and mandates might erode support for other public health measures such as mask wearing.
In this Viewpoint we consider the likely effectiveness of policies that require COVID-19 vaccines in improving vaccine uptake and reducing disease in the USA, in view of the evidence from past vaccination mandates and distinctive aspects of COVID-19. Two dimensions of effectiveness in improving uptake are relevant: (1) target-group effectiveness (the extent to which a mandate improves uptake of vaccines in the group covered by the policy) and (2) population effectiveness (the extent to which mandate policies improve vaccination coverage in the US population).
Millions of Americans may have asked themselves these questions, or versions of them—especially in the wake of horrific mass shootings like those in Buffalo and Uvalde. Record-breaking spikes in gun sales over the last two years, alongside surveys indicating that self-protection continues to be the dominant reason for buying guns, underscore a widely-held belief that a gun in the home has security benefits.
A new study from my research team, recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, shows no such benefits. We found the opposite: people living in homes with guns face substantially higher risks of being fatally assaulted.
Stanford health law experts Michelle Mello and David Studdert discuss the ongoing pandemic, proof of vaccination “passports” at the state and federal levels, and a July 19 ruling that Indiana University could require that its students be vaccinated.
Digital contact tracing has the potential to limit the spread of COVID-19. A contact-tracing smartphone app that has been readily adopted by people in England and Wales has shown efficacy in reducing disease spread.
The New England Journal of Medicine ,
March 3, 2021
Now that a third COVID-19 vaccine has been given emergency-use authorization, Michelle Mello and colleagues ask whether individuals should be able to choose which vaccine they receive.
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy,
February 1, 2021
I study team decisions among physician trainees. Exploiting a discontinuity in team roles across trainee tenure, I find evidence that teams alter decision-making, concentrating influence in the hands of senior trainees. I also demonstrate little convergence in variation of trainee effects despite intensive training. This general pattern of trainee effects on team decision-making exists in all types of decisions and settings that I examine. In analyses evaluating mechanisms behind this pattern, I find support for the idea that significant experiential learning occurs during training and that teams place more weight on judgments of senior trainees in order to aggregate information.
