Article explains the right granted to state public health agencies by the Supreme Court in Jacobson v Massachusetts to mandate vaccination in the presence of actual or threatened danger to the health of its residents from infectious disease.
Clinical trials for the blood substitute PolyHeme exposed the possibility for ambiguous interpretation of the FDA’s waiver of informed consent for emergency research.
Physicians have an obligation to consider a patient’s quality of life when making treatment decisions and should consider giving patients the options of withholding or withdrawing aggressive treatment if that treatment will not restore the kind of life the patient finds meaningful.
The ongoing anthrax vaccination case, Doe v Rumsfeld, tests whether the military can require participation in and punish refusal of a vaccination program while waiving informed consent.
Raphael P. Viscidi, MD and Keerti V. Shah, MD, DrPH
The arguments for mandatory vaccination with human papillomavirus vaccine differs from the justification for mandatory use of vaccines that protect against more easily transmitted diseases.
A growing number of states is enacting laws to protect the right of health care workers to conscientiously object to perform certain services that are morally opposed to.