Tipping the Scales for Public Well being (Eric Ip Profiled in HKU Bulletin)

“Tipping the Scales for Public Well being“
Eric Ip
HKU Bulletin
Revealed in November 2024

Pandemics, vaccination programmes and different public well being measures can’t succeed with out good authorized regimes. Professor Eric Ip Chi-yeung presents the case.

Within the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK authorities introduced that it was “following the science” in implementing extreme interventions. The strategy sounded cheap, however quickly revealed critical limitations, notably in regard to individuals’s freedoms and psychological well being. Equally, in Hong Kong, stringent interventions, resembling obligatory masking and quarantine, have been initially acceptable, however over time, with vaccinations and neighborhood immunity, they appeared unduly restrictive.

Professor of Regulation and public well being bioethicist Eric Ip Chi-yeung, who’s Co-Director of the Centre for Medical Ethics and Regulation, argues that policymakers are inclined to neglect that the rule of legislation is as essential to public well being as science, in his new ebook The Regulation and Regulation of Public Well being: World Views on Hong Kong.

“My ebook has two common messages. The primary is that every one the unimaginable achievements in public well being through the twentieth century have been made attainable by legislation, whether or not or not it’s felony legislation to punish those that don’t put on seatbelts or administrative legislation to empower sure public authorities to implement sanitation insurance policies, administer immunisation programmes, and so forth,” he mentioned.

“The second message is that whereas we want the steerage of scientists in making public well being choices, to rely solely on them could be woefully insufficient. Science can’t reply the essential questions that governments face such because the trade-offs within the social relationships between the person, the inhabitants and the state. Throughout a lockdown, an acceptable steadiness should be struck between respiratory well being and different dimensions of human flourishing, resembling familial love, friendship, psychological well-being, and financial stability.”