Laws for health and care worker protection and rights: A study of 182 countries.

The unprecedented and multi-faceted challenges health and care workers faced during the COVID-19 pandemic inspired the world's health ministers to call for a new Global Health and Care Worker Compact at the 74th World Health Assembly in 2021. The Care Compact identifies key areas where governments can use law and policy to prevent harm, provide support, ensure inclusivity, and safeguard rights of health and care workers toward improving population health. Using policy surveillance methods, we conducted an empirical analysis of the national law and policy environments on health and care workers' protection and rights in 182 countries.

Power, data and social accountability: defining a community-led monitoring model for strengthened health service delivery.

Introduction: Despite international commitment to achieving the end of HIV as a public health threat, progress is off-track and existing gaps have been exacerbated by COVID-19's collision with existing pandemics. Born out of models of political accountability and historical healthcare advocacy led by people living with HIV, community-led monitoring (CLM) of health service delivery holds potential as a social accountability model to increase the accessibility and quality of health systems. However, the effectiveness of the CLM model in strengthening accountability and improving service delivery relies on its alignment with evidence-based principles for social accountability mechanisms.

Facilitators and barriers to community-led monitoring of health programs: Qualitative evidence from the global implementation landscape.

Achieving the global HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria targets will require innovative strategies to deliver high quality and person-centered health services. Community-led monitoring (CLM) is a rapidly proliferating health systems strengthening intervention for improving healthcare services and documenting human rights violations, through social empowerment and political accountability. Driven in part by increasing financial support from donors, a growing number of countries are implementing CLM programs.

Increasing compliance with international pandemic law: international relations and new global health agreements.

Across multiple pandemics, global health governance institutions have struggled to secure the compliance of states with international legal and political commitments, ranging from data sharing to observing WHO guidance to sharing vaccines. In response, governments are negotiating a new pandemic treaty and revising the International Health Regulations. Achieving compliance remains challenging, but international relations and international law research in areas outside of health offers insights.

Intellectual Property and the Politics of Public Good during COVID-19: Framing Law, Institutions, and Ideas during TRIPS Waiver Negotiations at the WTO.

Context: To facilitate the manufacturing of COVID-19 medical products, in October 2020 India and South Africa proposed a waiver of certain intellectual property (IP) provisions of a World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement. After nearly two years, a narrow waiver agreement that did little for vaccine access passed the ministerial despite the pandemic's impact on global trade, which the WTO is mandated to safeguard.

Methods: The authors conducted a content analysis of WTO legal texts, key-actor statements, media reporting, and the WTO's procedural framework to explore legal, institutional, and ideational explanations for the delay.

[Planning for health equity in the Americas: an analysis of national health plansPlanejamento para equidade em saúde nas Américas: uma análise dos planos nacionais de saúde].

There is growing recognition that health and well-being improvements have not been shared across populations in the Americas. This article analyzes 32 national health sector policies, strategies, and plans across 10 different areas of health equity to understand, from one perspective, how equity is being addressed in the region. It finds significant variation in the substance and structure of how the health plans handle the issue.

Law, criminalisation and HIV in the world: have countries that criminalise achieved more or less successful pandemic response?

How do choices in criminal law and rights protections affect disease-fighting efforts? This long-standing question facing governments around the world is acute in the context of pandemics like HIV and COVID-19. The Global AIDS Strategy of the last 5 years sought to prevent mortality and HIV transmission in part through ensuring people living with HIV (PLHIV) knew their HIV status and could suppress the HIV virus through antiretroviral treatment. This article presents a cross-national ecological analysis of the relative success of national AIDS responses under this strategy, where laws were characterised by more or less criminalisation and with varying rights protections.

Mobility restrictions were associated with reductions in COVID-19 incidence early in the pandemic: evidence from a real-time evaluation in 34 countries.

Most countries have implemented restrictions on mobility to prevent the spread of Coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19), entailing considerable societal costs but, at least initially, based on limited evidence of effectiveness. We asked whether mobility restrictions were associated with changes in the occurrence of COVID-19 in 34 OECD countries plus Singapore and Taiwan. Our data sources were the Google Global Mobility Data Source, which reports different types of mobility, and COVID-19 cases retrieved from the dataset curated by Our World in Data.

Planning for health equity in the Americas: an analysis of national health plans.

There is growing recognition that health and well-being improvements have not been shared across populations in the Americas. This article analyzes 32 national health sector policies, strategies, and plans across 10 different areas of health equity to understand, from one perspective, how equity is being addressed in the region. It finds significant variation in the substance and structure of how the health plans handle the issue.

Tuberculosis, human rights, and law reform: Addressing the lack of progress in the global tuberculosis response.

Mathew Kavanagh and co-authors discuss law reform in the global tuberculosis response.

Global Policy Surveillance: Creating and Using Comparative National Data on Health Law and Policy.

Throughout the world, laws play an important role in shaping population health. Law making is an intervention with measurable effects yet often unfolds without evaluation or monitoring. Policy surveillance-the systematic, scientific collection and analysis of laws of public health significance-can help bridge this gap by capturing important features of law in numeric form in structured longitudinal data sets.

Understanding and comparing HIV-related law and policy environments: cross-national data and accountability for the global AIDS response.

Law and policy differences help explain why, as HIV-related science has advanced swiftly, some countries have realised remarkable progress on AIDS while others see expanding epidemics. We describe the structure and findings of a new dataset and research platform, the HIV Policy Lab, which fills an important knowledge gap by measuring the HIV-related policy environment across 33 indicators and 194 countries over time, with online access and visualisation. Cross-national indicators can be critical tools in international governance-building social power to monitor state behaviour with the potential to change policy and improve domestic accountability.

Democracy, Capacity, and Coercion in Pandemic Response: COVID-19 in Comparative Political Perspective.

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged governments around the world. It also has challenged conventional wisdom and empirical understandings in the comparative politics and policy of health. Three major questions present themselves: First, some of the countries considered to be most prepared-having the greatest capacity for outbreak response-have failed to respond effectively to the pandemic.