Industry challenges to the principle of prevention in public health: the precautionary principle in historical perspective

2002 ◽  
Vol 117 (6) ◽  
pp. 501-512 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Rosner ◽  
Gerald Markowitz
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Precautionary Principle ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
The Precautionary Principle

Balancing benefits and potential risks of vaccination: the precautionary principle and the law of unintended consequences

2021 ◽  
pp. bmjebm-2021-111773
Author(s):  
David Robert Grimes
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Precautionary Principle ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Vaccine Hesitancy ◽  
Public Health Issue ◽  
Public Confidence ◽  
The Precautionary Principle ◽  
Life Saving ◽  
Potential Risks ◽  
Risk And Benefit

Vaccination is a life-saving endeavour, yet risk and uncertainty are unavoidable in science and medicine. Vaccination remains contentious in the public mind, and vaccine hesitancy is a serious public health issue. This has recently been reignited in the discussion over potential side effects of COVID-19 vaccines, and the decision by several countries to suspend measures such as the AstraZeneca vaccine. In these instances, the precautionary principle has often been invoked as a rationale, yet such heuristics do not adequately weigh potential harms against real benefits. How we analyse, communicate and react to potential harms is absolutely paramount to ensure the best decisions and outcomes for societal health, and maintaining public confidence. While balancing benefits and risks is an essential undertaking, it cannot be achieved without due consideration of several other pertinent factors, especially in the context of vaccination, where misguided or exaggerated fears have in the past imperilled public health. While well meaning, over reactions to potential hazards of vaccination and other health interventions can have unintended consequences, and cause lingering damage to public trust. In this analysis, we explore the challenges of assessing risk and benefit, and the limitations of the precautionary principle in these endeavours. When risk is unclear, cautious vigilance might be a more pragmatic and useful policy than reactionary suspensions.

scholarly journals A Canadian Framework for Applying the Precautionary Principle to Public Health Issues

2010 ◽  
Vol 101 (5) ◽  
pp. 396-398 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica Weir ◽  
Richard Schabas ◽  
Kumanan Wilson ◽  
Chris Mackie
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Precautionary Principle ◽  
Health Issues ◽  
The Precautionary Principle

scholarly journals Reconciling civil liberties and public health in the response to COVID-19

FACETS ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 887-898
Author(s):  
Colleen M. Flood ◽  
Vanessa MacDonnell ◽  
Bryan Thomas ◽  
Kumanan Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Precautionary Principle ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Burden Of Proof ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
The Precautionary Principle ◽  
Response Strategies ◽  
The Right ◽  
Health Discourse

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the challenges governments face in balancing civil liberties against the exigencies of public health amid the chaos of a public health emergency. Current and emerging pandemic response strategies may engage diverse rights grounded in civil liberties, including mobility rights, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, and the right to liberty and security of the person. As traditionally conceived, the discourses of civil rights and public health rest on opposite assumptions about the burden of proof. In the discourse of civil and political rights of the sort guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the onus rests on government to show that any limitation on rights is justified. By contrast, public health discourse centers on the precautionary principle, which holds that intrusive measures may be taken—lockdowns, for example—even in the absence of complete evidence of the benefits of the intervention or of the nature of the risk. In this article, we argue that the two principles are not so oppositional in practice. In testing for proportionality, courts recognize the need to defer to governments on complex policy matters, especially where the interests of vulnerable populations are at stake. For their part, public health experts have incorporated ideas of proportionality in their evolving understanding of the precautionary principle. Synthesizing these perspectives, we emphasize the importance of policy agility in the COVID-19 response, ensuring that measures taken are continually supported by the best evidence and continually recalibrated to avoid unnecessary interference with civil liberties.

Precautionary information-generation in scienceand the law

2005 ◽  
Vol 52 (6) ◽  
pp. 65-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Cranor
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Precautionary Principle ◽  
Environment Monitoring ◽  
Generation System ◽  
Precautionary Approach ◽  
The Precautionary Principle ◽  
Information Generation ◽  
The Law

An information-generation system should be part of precautionary approaches to protecting the public's health and the environment. Such a system would include inventories or surveys of health and the environment, monitoring of them, as well as scoping out or scouting for threats or other harmful things that could occur and providing sentinels to try to identify threats before they materialize. I, then, suggest some ways in which such strategies could be adopted in science and the law as part of a precautionary approach. Doing more to generate information in an anticipatory way will assist implementation of the precautionary principle and help remove some of the uncertainty in environmental and public health protections.

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