Public health has, to some extent, become “yet another of America’s endless political battlegrounds,” said Wendy Parmet, who directs the Center for Health Policy and Law at Northeastern University School of Law. “We fight, politically, everything from Dr. Seuss to Covid,” she said. “What has happened is that in many states, as a result of […]

GBH legal analyst and Northeastern University law professor Daniel Medwed joined GBH’s Morning Edition to discuss the road ahead.

A growing number of colleges around the country will require students to get Covid-19 vaccinations before returning to campus. But the policies are igniting a debate over whether businesses and institutions like schools can make vaccines a condition of attendance. Photo: Northeastern University

Right now, even after concerted efforts to increase sequencing capacity, only about 3% of the country’s positive COVID-19 samples were sequenced in early April. That’s not just “unacceptable,” but “nearly worthless,” said Sam Scarpino, a bioinformatics assistant professor at Northeastern University and director of the school’s Emergent Epidemics Lab.

The President only has the power to pause the federal death penalty, according to Daniel S. Medwed, a University Distinguished Professor of Law and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University. “He can’t do much about the state death row cases, that’s up to the governors and legislators — but he could sweep death row clean by […]

“They’ve proven that the murder occurred,” Daniel Medwed, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University’s School of Law, told VICE News. “Now, the focus is all on whether the officers essentially facilitated it. And the key point for prosecutors is showing that they engaged in active behavior.”  

Northeastern University journalism professor and media observer Dan Kennedy writes, “Major crimes will always receive journalistic scrutiny. Official sources may have the upper hand early on, but as reporters keep digging, they’ll generally ferret out the truth. But we need a serious rethink of how we cover routine police news. And we need to do […]

“Several years later, the Supreme Court cited it as precedent for the constitutionality of state laws requiring that children be vaccinated prior to attending school (Zucht v. King),”  Wendy E. Parmet, an expert on public health policy and a law professor at Northeastern University, told AFP Fact Check.

Right now, even after concerted efforts to increase sequencing capacity, only about 3% of the country’s positive Covid-19 samples were sequenced in early April. That’s not just “unacceptable,” but “nearly worthless,” said Sam Scarpino, a bioinformatics assistant professor at Northeastern University and director of the school’s Emergent Epidemics Lab.

Here & Now‘s Peter O’Dowd speaks with Northeastern University Senior Vice President for External Affairs Mike Armini about the university’s decision to require that students be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 before returning to campus for full-time, in-person classes in the fall.

Depending on which denominator you use, your risk-benefit calculation is very different—the good of the many, the few, or the one? “Grossly put, physicians treat the patient, and epidemiologists treat the population,” says Sam Scarpino, head of the Emergent Epidemics Lab at Northeastern University. “But for infectious diseases, the distinction between the patient and the […]

To understand this and other factors in voting, my Northeastern University research team studied wait times and attitudes during the November 2020 presidential election. As part of that project, we partnered with YouGov to conduct a survey of 1,750 Americans, weighted to be nationally representative, that probed Americans’ willingness to wait in line to vote.