Carmel Shachar

Doctors, data scientists and hospital executives believe artificial intelligence may help solve what until now have been intractable problems. AI is already showing promise to…

Doctors, data scientists and hospital executives believe artificial intelligence may help solve problems that until now have been intractable. Hospitals are already using AI to…

The accessibility of the key abortion medication mifepristone hangs in the balance after a federal judge in Texas ruled earlier this month to suspend the…

Pregnancy is often talked about as though it’s a light switch. You’re a regular person walking around and then a switch flips — presto, you’re…

The power of unions to bargain over workplace health measures is at stake as the Massachusetts high court decides whether to allow a Covid-19 vaccine…

Health-care lawyers will be busy helping clients comply with or fight changing precedents on issues from abortion to drug pricing and the False Claims Act…

Dobbs’ biggest impact in a legal sense is around the right to privacy, which is not codified in the Constitution but has been established by…

This week, a federal judge struck down the CDC’s authority to mandate masks on public transportation, a move that many health officials oppose. Experts on Greater Boston told Jim Braude that decisions like those shouldn’t be left up to the legal system. "I think it's disappointing that a judge was actually the decision maker. I think even if the mandate is coming to an end, it seems like a sorry end to kind of the authority of the CDC in our public health arena,” said Dr. Louise Ivers, executive director of MGH Center for Global Health. Although some people celebrated the end of masking on planes and public transportation, others worry about the spread of coronavirus, especially to the elderly and young children. "I think from a social point of view, it's a really unsatisfying answer to say 'okay, well, people should just decide," said Carmel Shachar, executive director of Harvard Petrie-Flom Center.

The vaccine mandate for health-care workers will likely remain firm even as other cornerstones of President Joe Biden’s pandemic response dissolve with the administration’s messaging that the U.S. is in a new phase of the pandemic. The mandate requires health-care workers at facilities paid by Medicare and Medicaid to be fully vaccinated or they risk loss of funding. It was written at the peak of the delta variant surge. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Medicare agency’s mandate as the omicron variant ripped through the U.S. health-care system. ... But “the federal government is not a particularly nimble entity. It’s not designed to turn on a dime,” said Carmel Shachar, executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School.

Zenobia Shepherd can’t wrap her mind around her daughter’s death. Her heart won’t let her. Leilani Jordan, who had developmental challenges and was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, died in April 2020 of complications from covid-19. She was 27 and working in a Maryland grocery store when she fell ill and days later became one of the first faces of the pandemic’s devastating death toll. ... Carmel Shachar, the executive director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, said the question of whether an employer is liable if a worker is exposed to the coronavirus in the workplace is “is still fairly novel because the pandemic is still a fairly new phenomenon.” “Litigation around covid-19 workplace exposure has been increasing over the last year, and will likely continue to increase with the omicron explosion of cases,” Shachar said in an email.

An op-ed by Carmel Shachar and I. Glenn Cohen: “There are three quarters of a million new [COVID] cases yesterday. . . [t]hat is 10 times as many as when OSHA put in this ruling. The hospitals are today, yesterday, full. . . . Can you ask us—is that what you are doing now—to stop this vaccination rule with nearly one million people, nearly three quarters of a million people, new cases every day?” This was the dramatic question asked on Friday by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer of Scott Keller, one of the attorneys seeking a stay of an Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) promulgated by Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OHSA) in the case of National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor. This so called “Test-or-Vaccinate” mandate requires employers across the country with more than 100 employees to implement either vaccination or testing and masking policies for their employees. A majority of the Justices seem poised to endorse not only a temporary stay of the standard, but a permanent injunction against OSHA’s power to act, and the country will be worse for it.