Pivot: partisan policy responses to COVID-19 health disparities.

How did partisanship influence rhetoric about, public opinion of, and policies that prioritize racial and ethnic health disparities of COVID-19 during the first wave of the pandemic between March and July 2020? In this retrospective, mixed-methods analysis using national administrative and survey data, we found that the rhetoric and policy of shared sacrifice diminished and partisan differences in pandemic policy increased once it became clear to political elites that there were major racial disparities in COVID-19 cases and deaths. We trace how first disparities emerged in data and then were reported in elite, national media, discussed in Congress, and reflected in public opinion. Once racial disparities were apparent, partisan divides opened in media, public opinion, and legislative activity, with Democrats foregrounding inequality and Republicans increasingly downplaying the pandemic. This temporal dimension, focusing on how the diffusion of awareness of inequalities among elites shaped policy in the crucial months of early 2020, is the principal novel finding of our analysis. Overall, there is a clear, partisan policy response to addressing COVID-19 racial disparities across media, public opinion, subnational legislative activity, and congressional deliberations.

Policy Makes Politics Comment on "Modelling the Health Policy Process: One Size Fits All or Horses for Courses?"

Powell and Mannion's review of reviews maps the landscape of health policy research, showing a number of problematic and longstanding features. This commentary focuses on the extent to which health parochialism is good for the scientific development of the literature, the extent to which a "tournament of theories" actually develops our understanding of health policy process, and, finally, whether circumscribed theories of the policy process might be missing some of the most important and useful findings of broader comparative politics, which focus on the ways policies create politics over time. It concludes that health parochialism and focus on a circumscribed policy process is not likely to be helpful because it distracts attention from the ways in which coalitions and institutions over time shape politics and policy, a finding explored by scholars of many sectors whose findings should influence health policy research.

How do you solve a problem like Maria? The politics of disaster response in Puerto Rico, Florida and Texas.

COVID-19 is not the first, nor the last, public health challenge the US political system has faced. Understanding drivers of governmental responses to public health emergencies is important for policy decision-making, planning, health and social outcomes, and advocacy. We use federal political disaster-aid debates to examine political factors related to variations in outcomes for Puerto Rico, Texas, and Florida after the 2017 hurricane season. Despite the comparable need and unprecedented mortality, Puerto Rico received delayed and substantially less aid. We find bipartisan participation in floor debates over aid to Texas and Florida, but primarily Democrat participation for Puerto Rican aid. Yet, deliberation and participation in the debates were strongly influenced by whether a state or district was at risk of natural disasters. Nearly one-third of all states did not participate in any aid debate. States' local disaster risk levels and political parties' attachments to different racial and ethnic groups may help explain Congressional public health disaster response failures. These lessons are of increasing importance in the face of growing collective action problems around the climate crisis and subsequent emergent threats from natural disasters.

Defining and analyzing health system resilience in rural jurisdictions.

Rural areas face well known and distinctive health care challenges that can limit their resilience in the face of health emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic. These include problems of sparsity and consequent limited health care provisioning; poverty, inequalities, and distinctive economic structures that limit access to health care; and underlying population health risks and inequalities that can increase vulnerability. Nonetheless, not all rural areas face the same problems, and non-rural areas can have challenges. To be useful in influencing policy, a tool to identify more and less resilient areas is necessary. This Commentary reviews key forms of risk and constructs a county-level index of resilience for the United States which helps to identify countries with limited resilience. Further, it argues that health care resilience should be conceptualized in terms of broader regions than counties since health care facilities' referral regions are larger than individual counties; resilience needs to be understood at that level. The index, read at the level of counties and referral regions, can contribute to identification of immediate problems as well as targets for longer term investment and policy response.

From Health in All Policies to Health for All Policies.

Worldwide responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have shown that it is possible for politicians to come together across departmental boundaries. To this end, in many countries, heads of government and their health ministers work closely with all other ministries, departments, and sectors, including social affairs, internal affairs, foreign affairs, research and education, transport, agriculture, business, and state aid. In this Viewpoint, we ask if and how the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can support intersectoral collaboration to promote health, since governments have already committed to achieving them. We contend that SDGs can do so, ultimately advancing health while offering co-benefits across society.

Strategic purchasing and health systems resilience: Lessons from COVID-19 in selected European countries.

Strategic purchasing is a popular and frequently proposed policy for improving the efficiency and adaptiveness of health systems. The COVID-19 pandemic shocked health systems, creating a test of the adaptability and resiliency of their key features. This research study explores (i) what role purchasing systems and agents played in the COVID-19 pandemic, (ii) if it was strategic, and (iii) how it has contributed to a resilient health system. We conducted a qualitative, comparative study of six countries in the European Union-focusing on three as in-depth case studies-to understand how and when strategic purchasers responded to seven clearly defined health system "shocks" that they all experienced during the pandemic. We found that every case country relied on the federal government to fund and respond to the pandemic. Purchasers often had very limited, and if any then only passive, roles.

Impact on the NHS and health of the UK's trade and cooperation relationship with the EU, and beyond.

The UK's relationship with the European Union (EU) is now embodied in two principal legal instruments: the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, which formally entered into force on 1 May 2021; and the Withdrawal Agreement, with its Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland, which continues to apply. Using a 'building blocks' framework for analysis of national health systems derived from the World Health Organisation, this article examines the likely impacts in the UK of this legal settlement on the National Health Service (NHS), health and social care. Specifically, we determine the extent to which the trade, cooperation and regulatory aspects of those legal measures support positive impacts for the NHS and social care. We show that, as there is clear support for positive health and care outcomes in only one of the 17 NHS 'building blocks', unless mitigating action is taken, the likely outcomes will be detrimental. However, as the legal settlement gives the UK a great deal of regulatory freedom, especially in Great Britain, we argue that it is crucial to track the effects of proposed new health and social care-related policy choices in the months and years ahead.

Centralizing and decentralizing governance in the COVID-19 pandemic: The politics of credit and blame.

COVID-19 led to significant and dynamic shifts in power relations within and between governments, teaching us how governments make health policies and how health crises affect government. We focus on centralization and decentralization within and between governments: within government, meaning the extent to which the head of government controls policy; and between governments, meaning the extent to which the central government pre-empts or controls local and regional government. Political science literature suggests that shifting patterns of centralization and decentralization can be explained by leading politicians' efforts to gain credit for popular actions and outcomes and deflect blame for unpopular ones. We test this hypothesis in two ways: by coding the Health Systems Response Monitor's data on government responses, and through case studies of the governance of COVID-19 in Austria, Czechia and France. We find that credit and blame do substantially explain the timing and direction of changes in centralization and decentralization. In the first wave, spring 2020, heads of government centralized and raised their profile in order to gain credit for decisive action, but they subsequently tried to decentralize in order to avoid blame for repeated restrictions on life or surges of infection. These findings should shape advice on governance for pandemic response.

Regional International Organizations and Health: A Framework for Analysis.

CONTEXT: Regional international organizations (RIOs), from the South African Development Community (SADC) to the European Union (EU), are organizations that promote cooperation among countries in a specific region of the world. Asking what RIOs do to health and health policy by looking only at their formal health policies can understate their effects (e.g., a free trade agreement with no stated health goals can affect health policy) and overstate their effects (as with agreements full of ambition that did not deliver much). METHODS: We adopt a "three-faces" framework that identifies RIOs' direct health policies, the effects of their trade and market policies, and their effects on health via fiscal governance of their member states to better capture their health impact. We tested the usefulness of the framework by examining the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, EU, North American Free Trade Agreement, SADC, and the Union of South American Nations. FINDINGS: All RIOs had some impact on health systems and policies, and, in many cases, the principal policies were not identified as health policy. CONCLUSIONS: Such a framework will be useful in understanding the effects of RIOs on health systems and policies because it captures indirect and even unintended health effects in a way that permits development of explanatory theories.

Perspectives in the study of the political economy of COVID-19 vaccine regulation.

Vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 continue to be developed at an astonishingly quick speed and the early ones, like Pfizer and Moderna, have been shown to be more effective than many public health scientists had dared to hope. As COVID-19 vaccine research continues to progress, the world's eyes are turning toward medicine regulators. COVID-19 vaccines need to be authorized for use in each country in which the pharmaceutical industry intends to commercialize its product. This results in a patchwork of regulations that can influence the speed at which products are launched and the standards that govern them. In this research forum article, we discuss several key questions about COVID-19 vaccine regulations that should shape research on the next stage of the pandemic response. We call for a research agenda that looks into the political economy of pharmaceutical regulation, particularly from a comparative perspective, including Global South countries.

Can Comorbidity Data Explain Cross-State and Cross-National Difference in COVID-19 Death Rates?

Many efforts to predict the impact of COVID-19 on hospitalization, intensive care unit (ICU) utilization, and mortality rely on age and comorbidities. These predictions are foundational to learning, policymaking, and planning for the pandemic, and therefore understanding the relationship between age, comorbidities, and health outcomes is critical to assessing and managing public health risks. From a US government database of 1.4 million patient records collected in May 2020, we extracted the relationships between age and number of comorbidities at the individual level to predict the likelihood of hospitalization, admission to intensive care, and death. We then applied the relationships to each US state and a selection of different countries in order to see whether they predicted observed outcome rates. We found that age and comorbidity data within these geographical regions do not explain much of the international or within-country variation in hospitalization, ICU admission, or death. Identifying alternative explanations for the limited predictive power of comorbidities and age at the population level should be considered for future research.

Social policy as an integral component of pandemic response: Learning from COVID-19 in Brazil, Germany, India and the United States.

It is easy but mistaken to think that public health emergency measures and social policy can be separated. This paper compares the experiences of Brazil, Germany, India and the United States during their 2020 responses to the COVID-19 pandemic to show that social policies such as unemployment insurance, flat payments and short-time work are crucial to the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions as well as to their political sustainability. Broadly, public health measures that constrain economic activity will only be effective and sustainable if paired with social policy measures that enable people to comply without sacrificing their livelihoods and economic wellbeing. Tough public health policies and generous social policies taken together proved a success in Germany. Generous social policies uncoupled from strong public health interventions, in Brazil and the US during the summer of 2020, enabled lockdown compliance but failed to halt the pandemic, while tough public health measures without social policy support rapidly collapsed in India. In the COVID-19 and future pandemics, public health theory and practice should recognise the importance of social policy to the immediate effectiveness of public health policy as well as to the long-term social and economic impact of pandemics.

Termites of Solidarity in the House of Austerity: Undermining Fiscal Governance in the European Union.

European Union (EU) fiscal governance, especially the European Semester, is an ambitious new governance architecture involving surveillance and discipline, across both Eurozone and non-Eurozone member state policies, in pursuit of fiscal rigor. It is the most recent of several attempts to expand EU powers over member state policy with the goal of austere budgeting, and one that has led to remarkable claims of authority by the EU over member state health policies as detailed as medical school admissions and the role of primary care. It is expected that it would be resisted not just by those who object to an EU role in the organization and delivery of health care but also by those who object to a particular austere approach to health policy. How well is it working? Using two waves of interviews and documentary analysis, and health as a policy case study, the authors document three key techniques that opponents use to undermine the semester's governance architecture: broadening goals, expanding the scope of conflict, and disputing and nuancing indicators. The result is that opponents of a narrow fiscal governance agenda are again successfully undermining the narrow focus of the semester.

What Is EU Public Health and Why? Explaining the Scope and Organization of Public Health in the European Union.

Public health is notoriously difficult to define, and that is the case for public health in the European Union as much as other political systems. In this article, the authors try to identify the actual scope and meaning of public health as it is institutionalized in the EU political system. Using a mixture of historical policy and legal analysis, the authors show how the evolution of the institutional space called public health in the EU has been shaped by the EU's distinctive constitutional nature, its focus on regulation, and the legacy of its focus on market making as well as the preferences of its political leaders. The European Union does have an increasingly large space named "public health," in which health ministers, the health directorate-general, and invocation of its public health treaty article 168 can be found, as well as a much broader and older area of activities justified by the need to manage adverse health consequences of market-making policies in other areas such as labor standards and agriculture. The COVID-19 crisis of 2020 not only led to a strengthening of EU public health but also showed that the EU is one of the many political systems in which the legal and bureaucratic domain of public health is far smaller than the actual issues affecting the public's health.

Denial and Distraction: How the Populist Radical Right Responds to COVID-19 Comment on "A Scoping Review of PRR Parties' Influence on Welfare Policy and its Implication for Population Health in Europe".

This commentary considers the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on the study of populist radical right (PRR) politicians and their influence on public health and health policy. A systematic review of recent research on the influence of PRR politicians on the health and welfare policies shows that health is not a policy arena that these politicians have much experience in. In office, their effects can be destructive, primarily because they subordinate health to their other goals. Brazil, the US and the UK all show this pattern. PRR politicians in opposition such as the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) in Austria or the Lega in Italy, said very little during the actual health crisis, but once the public no longer appeared afraid they lost no time in reactivating anti-European Union (EU) sentiments. Whether in government or in opposition, PRR politicians opted for distraction and denial. Their effects ranged from making the pandemic worse.

Changing health care with, for, or against the public: an empirical investigation into the place of the public in health service reconfiguration.

OBJECTIVES: This study sought to understand the different approaches taken to involving the public in service reconfiguration in the four United Kingdom health systems. METHODS: This was a multi-method study involving policy document analysis and qualitative semi-structured interviews in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. RESULTS: Despite the diversity of local situations, interview participants tended to use three frames within which they understood the politics of service reconfigurations: an adversarial approach which assumed conflict over scarce resources (change against the public); a communications approach which defined the problem as educating the public on the desirability of change (change for the public); and a collaborative approach which attempted to integrate the public early into discussions about the shape and nature of desirable services (change with the public). These three framings involved different levels of managerial time, energy, and resources and called on different skill sets, most notably marketing and communications for the communications approach and community engagement for the collaborative approach. CONCLUSIONS: We argue that these framings of public involvement co-exist within organisations. Health system leaders, in framing service reconfiguration as adversarial, communicative or collaborative, are deciding between conceptions of the relationship between health care organisations and their publics in ways that shape the nature of the debates that follow. Understanding the reasons why organisations adopt these frames would be a fruitful way to advance both theory and practice.