Category: Blog

At the turn of the century, Measles was considered eliminated across the US. At the time, Measles was not constantly present, and cases were occasional. Twenty-five years later, two children have died in Texas, and another individual’s death is under investigation in New Mexico after testing positive. Measles has since expanded across 25 states, as well as the District of Columbia. The children who passed were unvaccinated. Health experts routinely urge the public to vaccinate themselves and their children as the number one method of preventing the disease. The first vaccinationprovides 93 percent protection, and the second increases it to 97 percent. 

In 2024, there were a total of 285 cases of Measles, and 89% of cases impacted someone who was unvaccinated or whose vaccination status was unknown. Within the first four months of 2025, that number has been surpassed. As of April 11, 2025, the CDC reports 712 cases, with 97% of those impacted being unvaccinated or having an unknown vaccination status. To protect against the spread of measles, communities benefit from power in numbers. More than 95 percent of a community should be vaccinated. Measles is highly contagious and can travel from person to personby simply breathing contaminated air. The virus can live in the airspace for up to two hours after the infected person leaves. Vaccination rates have been declining and dipping below the recommended amount. 

Experts are concerned about the health and safety costs that come with declining public trust in science and medicine. Parental concerns and vaccine skepticism are seen as contributing to declining herd or collective immunity. Robert F Kennedy Jr, United States Secretary of Health and Human Serivces’s stance on vaccinations has been publicly debated. Kennedy stated, “I support the measles vaccine” at his confirmation hearing on January 29. 2025.

A 2023 study stated, “vaccine hesitancy is a public health threat” and that a “one-size-fits-all approach is unlikely to be successful.” Further, it encouraged safe and nonjudgmental discussions about vaccines to help combat misinformation and vaccine hesitancy. Eroded trust in vaccines, and healthcare in general play a significant role in vaccine hesitancy. The sociocultural of a community, and the opinions that the community shares regarding the safety of vaccines influence individual and parental decision-making. Most parents who do not vaccinate their children fear the vaccine causes autism based on a prior study that was later retracted. This study, the Wakefield study was found to be based on scientific misconduct and deemed to misrepresent data in a fraudulent capacity. Since then, multiple studies have been conducted that do not connect childhood vaccines with autism. 

The public health threat of Measles poses a health risk to anyone infected, but is even more dangerous for young children, due to their weaker immune system and developing organ system. All states require children to be vaccinated against multiple diseases before attending school. Most states also include private schools under this set of regulations and other states include children who are homeschooled as a further public safety measure. Babies are recommended to receive their first MMR vaccine between the ages of 12 to 15 months and their second between the ages of four and six. However, special circumstances exist to vaccinate infants as young as six months if an outbreak or family travel plans pose an added risk to the child’s health. 

State laws vary on the types of acceptable documentation required to prove immunizations. Additionally, vaccine exemptions exist for individuals with medical, religious, or philosophical objections to vaccination. Students who are unvaccinated can be exempted from school during an outbreak as an added layer of precaution. Some states require that for a child to attend school without proper vaccinations, there is a parental education requirement to discuss the risks of being unvaccinated. Often, this requirement involves religious or philosophical exemption. In March, West Virginia’s legislature rejected a bill that would have relaxed school vaccination requirements. The state is among those in the country with the strictest regulations on immunizations for school-age children and only permits medical exemptions. 

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision striking down the federal right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization states have rapidly formulated new legislation to restrict access to abortion. This includes laws seeking to criminalize individuals who assist pregnant people in traveling out of state to receive abortions. Today, almost half of all U.S. states have worked to make it more difficult to get an abortion; this is despite the growth in the number of abortions, rising 11% from 2020. This increase makes sense when factoring in the number of people crossing state lines for abortion services, doubling from 81,000 in 2020 to 171,000 in 2023. Even Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the Dobbs decision that states may not legally prevent citizens from crossing state lines for abortion care, citing his belief in the constitutional right to interstate travel.

This explicit interpretation has not stopped states like Idaho, Alabama, and Tennessee from complicating the process of traveling for an abortion. In 2023, Idaho became the first state to ban so-called “abortion trafficking,” which it defines as the “recruiting, harboring, or transporting” of a pregnant minor for the purpose of seeking abortion care without parental permission. In May 2024, Tennessee enacted a similar law, and Alabama followed suit soon after. Abortion rights leaders have been quick to file lawsuits in Alabama, Idaho, and Tennessee, on the basis that the laws are “vague and violate constitutional rights to free speech and travel between states.” Supporters of the laws maintain that they have a key interest in protecting parental rights, preventing other adults from persuading young people to make life-changing decisions. Critics of the law, however, worry about the long-term impacts of “allow[ing] prosecutors to project power across state lines.”

The Idaho law was successfully passed, but without the “recruiting” clause, which was blocked by the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. Furthermore, a court in Tennessee blocked enforcement of their abortion ban, but only in situations of certain approved emergencies. Alabama is the latest in this trend, U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson in Montgomery, Alabama ruled that “the state cannot interfere with the basic constitutional right to travel, and that prosecuting doctors or organizations for helping patients would violate their right to free speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.” This presents a win for the fight for reproductive justice in America. 

Despite the overruling of the federal right to abortion in 2022, abortion rights activists are working to prove that laws restricting access to abortion care across state lines present clear violations of the constitutional right to interstate travel and a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech. But for now, only three out of fifty states have enacted this brand of legislation and only time will tell how other states may react. 

Pennsylvania recently amended its Safe Haven laws to allow parents to surrender their newborns at urgent care centers without criminal liability. Previously, under Pennsylvania law, parents could only surrender their infants at hospitals, emergency medical services providers, and police stations without liability. However, in a recent amendment, Pennsylvania’s legislators expanded this law to include urgent care centers. Now, urgent care centers must accommodate the law through policies, training, and updates to their premises. 

The Newborn Protection Act allows parents of infants 28 days old or younger to leave the infant at these ‘safe havens’ without criminal liability, so long as the newborn is not a victim of child abuse or neglect. If a child is a victim of child abuse and being surrendered, the parents may face criminal liabilities.

Healthcare providers are mandatory reporters of child abuse, under Pennsylvania law. As a baseline, healthcare providers always must report any suspected child abuse, even if a newborn is not being surrendered. Accordingly, healthcare providers, ideally, should already be training employees to know the signs of suspected abuse and have adequate reporting procedures in place. When a provider suspects abuse, they are responsible for filing a report of the suspected abuse with law enforcement. Given that urgent care centers are healthcare providers, these facilities should already have reporting procedures and training in place for suspected abuse. 

Yet, because urgent care centers do not offer as robust healthcare services as hospitals, the Newborn Protection Act will require urgent care centers to transport the surrendered newborn to a hospital and place the newborn in the care of another healthcare provider within that hospital. This is an additional step that hospitals do not need to undertake, as they already have the resources to assume custody of a surrendered newborn unlike an urgent care center, which is designed to only provide temporary and acute services. 

Like hospitals, police stations, and emergency medical services providers, urgent care centers must now adequately train personnel to properly inquire into possible child abuse. Urgent care centers are now required to post signage, stating the hours in which they will accept newborns. The urgent care centers will be required to provide an incubator as well, for parents to anonymously surrender their children. Incubators lock from the inside so that third parties cannot access the surrendered newborn.

Ultimately, the Newborn Protection Act seeks to provide a safe way for parents to surrender children. However, urgent care centers will need to ensure they adapt their training and procedures to comply with the expansions of the Act as soon as possible, to ensure that they are not turning a blind eye to suspected child abuse or neglect.

In August 2024, the Vermont Supreme Court decided that a family could not sue a school district, superintendent, or school nurse after their child was accidentally given a COVID-19 vaccine without parental consent. The unauthorized vaccination occurred in 2021 in the Windham Southeast School District of Brattleboro, Vermont, during a vaccine clinic hosted by the Vermont Department of Health and the school district. Prior to the clinic, the student’s father expressed to an assistant principal that the plaintiffs did not consent to have L.P. vaccinated, and on the day of the clinic, the child “verbally protested,” saying, “Dad said no.” Nonetheless, the clinic workers administer one dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. Based on these events, L.P.’s family filed an eight-count complaint in the civil division alleging negligence and battery. The defendants argued that they were immune from state-law claims under the PREP Act. 

The PREP Act, passed by Congress in 2005, authorizes the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services to specify the distribution or use of a “covered countermeasure”. During a public health emergency, “covered persons” are immune from all claims causally related to the administration of a covered countermeasure, and vaccines fall into that class. The Vermont Supreme Court decided that the defendants were “covered persons” under the PREP Act, so while the incident exhibited a lack of parental consent, those administering the vaccines were afforded legal protections. Ultimately, the case was dismissed.

In a similar case, the North Carolina Supreme Court concluded that the broad scope of immunity provided by the PREP Act applied to clinic workers at Northwest Guilford High School. In August 2021, Brett Happel drove his fourteen-year-old stepson, Tanner Happel, to a testing site at Northwest Guilford High School after receiving a notification of possible exposure. The Happels also received a letter stating that unless parents allowed their children to be tested, student-athletes could not return to practice until cleared by a public health professional. Tanner Happel was seated in the testing facility when a clinic worker tried unsuccessfully to contact Happel’s mother and obtain consent to administer a COVID-19 vaccine to him. After failing to make contact, a worker was instructed to “give it to him anyway.” Despite Happel stating that he did not want the procedure, a clinic worker administered a Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. 

As medical care becomes increasingly complex, practical dimensions of informed consent fall under heightened scrutiny. Requirements for informed consent may change after Congressional regulations pass and vary under different jurisdictions. Under the legal doctrine of informed consent, patients have the right to make informed and voluntary treatment decisions. This ensures that the patient is fully informed about a procedure’s nature, risks, and alternative treatments. A patient can refuse or withdraw consent at any time during treatment, but informed consent promotes trust in the patient-provider relationship.

Some online claims falsely suggest that the Vermont ruling permits vaccinations without parental consent, which is not true. However, the Vermont Supreme Court case has sparked debates on government immunity and individual rights in both emergency and public healthcare policies. The Vermont case determined civil liability in the wake of a global health crisis. Contemporaneously, the case also raises serious questions about the scope of informed consent and government authority during public health emergencies. 

The arrival of 2025 saw the inauguration of Donald Trump for his second term and his Administration’s takeover of the federal government. The confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Health Secretary means that the Trump Administration is positioned to impose its policy choices on all aspects of the federal government under that wing, which includes the National Institutes of Health (NIH). In an early example of what these policy decisions may look like, the NIH released this statement detailing new policies relating to access to their campus by patients and study participants.

Going forward, noncitizens who do not possess a valid Green Card and who visit the NIH campus must register in advance with the NIH. This rule applies to both first-time visitors and those who had an established relationship with the NIH before 2025. Among other things, affected visitors are now required to disclose their full name, citizenship status, passport information, as well as any visa information if the visitor is from a country from which the United States requires a visa. Citizens of the United States and Green Card holders are not required to disclose this information to the NIH before visiting.

At the bottom of the notice, the NIH acknowledges that while the gathering of this information is for their records, that information will be accessible to other federal agencies. The most obvious implication of this policy change is that the Department of Homeland Security, which is the department under which immigration agencies operate (such as Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE)) theoretically can use the data collected from the NIH to identify fresh targets for prosecution and deportation.

One of the main functions of the NIH is to advance medical science by fostering research. Patients who have exhausted traditional options for treatment can take part in clinical trials that test new, experimental treatments that may offer hope. Insurance is not required to participate in all studies; participants are rather usually paid for their time, and healthy volunteers are often sought as well. As such, the NIH offers benefits to those who cannot otherwise afford to see a doctor, as well as to those who have already tried traditional options for treatment. When one considers that undocumented immigrants are more likely to fall within the lower economic classes and not carry health insurance compared to American citizens, the federal government seems to force an impossible choice: health, or home?

The Trump Administration has been forward in expressing its aim to deport undocumented immigrants en masse. This update in NIH policy comes on the heels of the Administration’s announcement of their intent to create a national registry for undocumented immigrants. However, as a side effect of these policy goals, medical research in the United States may be further hampered by the loss of a valuable resource: volunteers.

In an effort to handle what he has stated as a “rampant drug smuggling and overdose death” problem in the United States, Trump has confirmed that new 25 percent tariffs will go into effect on March 4^th against Mexico and Canada, with an additional 10 percent tariff against China. Despite a nearly 24 percent drop in fatal overdose deaths, there were still an estimated 61,393 opioid-related deaths in the 12 months ending September 2024. Throughout his campaign, Trump called for an end to the “drug epidemic” through harsher sentencing, and even advocated for the use of the death penalty, for drug dealers. History has shown that harsher sentencing and “crackdowns” on drugs and drug use are ineffective, furthering stigmatization and thus limiting access to treatment and promoting the issue rather than curbing it.

Following Nixon’s implementation of the “war on drugs” in 1971, New York introduced harsh sentencing in 1973, mandating a minimum of 15 years to life for dealers and users. These statutes, known as the “Rockefeller Drug Laws,” were the harshest drug-sentencing measures in the country. This new era of harsh sentencing led to a 1,216 percent increase in state prison populations for drug offenses between 1980 and 2008, which, since its inception, has adversely affected black individuals, who are 3.6 times more likely to be arrested for selling drugs and 2.5 times more likely to be arrest for possessing drugs than white individuals.

In recent years, data has shown that there is no statistically significant relationship between state drug imprisonment rates and drug use, drug overdose deaths, and drug arrests. With the recent decrease in overdose-related deaths, increased access to medication-assisted treatment for substance use disorder, and successes of harm reduction programs (such as naloxone, syringe service programs, safe consumption sites, etc.) the use of harsher sentencing as a tactic to fight drugs and drug use in the United States would be a major setback for the country.

Substance use, while including criminal aspects, should be viewed from a treatment lens, not a punitive perspective. History has shown that mandatory minimums, harsher sentences, and increased arrests do not curb the rate of overdose deaths, but have increased it. One study found that within one week of a “drug bust” local overdose deaths doubled due to users seeking supplies from unfamiliar sources. The United States simultaneously has the highest rate of incarceration, the highest rate of drug use, and the highest rate of drug-related deaths. Punitive approaches do not work and policy experts fear that Trump’s efforts could set the nation back in its attempt to address these issues. Should the United States revert to historically ineffective ways of addressing drug use, the exponential work that has been done could be nullified and the nation’s success in dropping overdose regress. With all of Trump’s latest actions, it is important that we not forget about the 48.5 million Americans who face addiction every day and could be greatly impacted by Trump’s punitive approaches.