Nov 29, 2021

GREELEY TRIBUNE: In most states, including Colorado, boards of health are able to add more vaccines to their lists of school immunization requirements. So there is a solid legal ground for state officials to require COVID-19 vaccines for schoolchildren, said Daniel Goldberg, JD, PhD, a public health law expert at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities. “Can they do it: absolutely,” he said. “Will they do it?

Nov 22, 2021

KUNC COLORADO EDITION: Stigma scholar, Daniel Goldberg, JD, PhD says, “The best evaluations we have on stigma are very clear that stigma flows from things like power, oppression, race, class, gender, ability or disability status; these same oppressions that are driving differences between people are the ones that create stigma, that separate in-groups from out-groups, which is what stigma is. What can we do to move the needle on stigma structurally, to change some of the structures that drive stigma against marginalized, victimized and vulnerable groups?

Nov 21, 2021

DENVER POST: Colorado is in the process of updating the state’s crisis standards of care as the COVID-19 situation worsens. The frustration that some vaccinated people feel is understandable, but it’s not acceptable to withhold care from people because they may have contributed to their illness, said Matthew Wynia, Director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities. Even measures that some people might feel are punitive, like withholding a liver transplant if a person is unable to stop drinking heavily, are focused on the future and how likely it is that the surgery will save a life, he said. “We don’t punish people for their bad decisions,” he said.

Dec 2, 2021

JAMA OPTHALMOLOGY: Authors Lisa I. Iezzoni, MD, MSc; Sowmya R. Rao, PhD; Julie Ressalam, MPH; Dragana Bolcic-Jankovic, PhD, and Eric G. Campbell, PhD surveyed 1,400 physicians across 7 specialties (family medicine, general internal medicine, rheumatology, neurology, ophthalmology, orthopedic surgery, and obstetrics-gynecology) about their use of basic accommodations when caring for patients with significant vision limitations. They found that less than one-tenth of physicians practicing in the US who care for patients with significant vision limitations usually or always describe clinic spaces or provide large-font materials, and less than one-third of ophthalmologists do so.
In an invited commentary, Jacqueline Ramke, MPH, PhD, believes that unique barriers that people with vision impairment face have been ignored in health care settings, which translates to broader health inequities. Ramke calls for creation of accessible health care environments which are neccessary for equity, autonomy, and the rights of people with vision impairment.

Nov 22, 2021

KUNC: In 2018, Colorado launched “Lift The Label,” an opioid anti-stigma public awareness campaign. Daniel Goldberg, JD, PhD studies laws and policies which deeply stigmatize persons who use drugs or persons who live with substance use disorder. One of his suggestions was to acknowledge that stigma “doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s a function of social power.” Black and brown communities and other marginalized groups are more likely to experience intersecting forms of stigma (like a pain condition and racial discrimination) at the same time, he said.

Nov 19, 2021

WYOMING PUBLIC RADIO: Society has also lost control of the ability to say who should and should not get a booster, said Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH. "The minute we started distributing the vaccines through individual doctor's offices and pharmacies and outside of big health systems and mass vaccination sites, where you had to register, we kind of lost control of the allocation scheme," Wynia said. "So at the moment ... if you walk into a Walgreens and say, 'I want to get a booster,' you're probably going to get a booster."

Nov 19, 2021

FACTCHECK: “We are not using vaccination status in making triage decisions. We are treating everyone the same according to their medical needs,” Center Director Matthew Wynia said. “Bottom line: health care professionals don’t punish people for making bad medical decisions, even when those decisions harm both themselves and others.”

Nov 18, 2021

CPR-COLORADO MATTERS: Center Director Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH explains, "There's enormous amounts of disappointment, frustration, anger. You certainly hear that when you speak to people in the healthcare system. Some 80 percent of the folks we're seeing coming into our hospitals with COVID now, are the relatively few people remaining who are completely unvaccinated. That's who's showing up on our doorsteps and that is very frustrating, as we this week are looking at implementing "Crisis Standards of Care," because our health system is so swamped. At our health system for example, the national standard is you should have is one respiratory technician for every 5 people you have on a ventilator. We currently have one respiratory technician for every 15 people we have on ventilators. That's not only unsafe for patients, that's not at all ideal for those respiratory technicians. They are really being crushed by this current wave."

Nov 12, 2021

WASHINGTON POST: Califf, 70, a renowned cardiologist and researcher, is senior adviser for Verily, a research organization, and Google Health. He spent much of his career at Duke University, where he founded the Duke Clinical Research Institute. CBH Research Director Eric G. Campbell is a health-policy expert who has done extensive research on the impact of financial conflicts of interest in medicine, said Califf’s past ties with industry should not disqualify him. “To my knowledge those relationships have been fully discussed and widely debated in the academic and political arena,” Campbell said, adding that many academic trials are underwritten by drug companies.

Nov 12, 2021

THE DENVER GAZETTE: The previous standards plan described a dire situation in which patients more likely to live would be given care over others, the focus has now flipped, said Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH. The focus now is likely to be on keeping less-sick patients out of the hospital or out of intensive care beds if that can be safely done. "It's trying to find those people who will be OK, even if they don't get a service they would normally get, even if they get discharged a little early, even if they go to the floor instead of the step-down or to step-down instead of ICU," he said.

Nov 11, 2021

DENVER POST: The current standards for rationing care largely rely on a formula to quantify patients’ odds of surviving the next month and the next year. The scoring system doesn’t allow the triage team to consider non-medical factors, like a person’s socioeconomic status, but those could be relevant in deciding who can safely be sent home with a referral to outpatient care, said Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH. “I would hate to see… sending someone home who’s homeless,” Wynia said.

Nov 11, 2021

9NEWS: Dr Matt Wynia, Director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities, said because of that change from predicting mortality to predicting who will be okay without certain services, socioeconomic status needs to be a factor. “I would hate to use a criterion that was purely clinical and end up sending someone home who's homeless, and keeping someone in the hospital who is wealthy and could very well afford to have someone come and check on them at home," Wynia said.

Nov 9, 2021

9NEWS: "We're doing this because we have to. We have no choice," according to Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH. "The fundamental ethical principle here is, you're trying to save as many lives as you can, with the limited resources you've got."

Nov 9, 2021

KUNC COLORADO EDITION: The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 in Colorado is at its highest level since last December. With hospitals filling up, Gov. Jared Polis signed an executive order on Oct. 31 that gives the state control over hospital admissions and transfers. Interview with Jon Samet and Matthew Wynia.

Oct 30, 2021

DAILY MAIL: Professor Lisa Bero, CBH Senior Scientist and an expert in study fraud at Cochrane, warns of 'paper mills' – shadowy companies that operate online, churning out sham studies much like the 'essay mills' that profit by selling work to students. Academics investigating these paper mills recently flagged more than 1,000 potential research fraud cases linked to them. The article also linked to a UK Podcast, Medical Minefield, where Dr. Bero is interviewed for their story " Can We Really Trust Medical Research?"

Nov 2, 2021

COLORADO GAZETTE: "The state has not had to ration care in Colorado during the pandemic," said Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH. Though the worst-case provisions remain inactive, some rural hospitals are implementing similar strategies. Patients who may need an ICU bed are being boarded in the emergency department. “My fear right now is that outside of the hospitals, people don’t realize how bad this is,” Wynia said. “They don’t think this is like January, at all. They think it’s OK right now. So people are behaving as though we have nothing to worry about. ... Unfortunately, that attitude is going to just tear up the health care system.”

Nov 2, 2021

WASHINGTON POST: Right now there are “two Colorados,” said Matthew Wynia, Director of the Center for Bioethics and Humanities. “If you’re in the health-care system — if you’re a patient needing services in a hospital or if you’re a medical practitioner, things are really bad,” he said. “But if you’re a regular citizen just walking around on the street, you wouldn’t know it. People are behaving as though things are normal.”

Oct 29, 2021

The US Department of Homeland Security cited Professor Warren Binford's research with Human Rights Watch in support of its decision to end the Migrant Protection Protocols. The citation is just in a footnote (Pg.6 fn.19), but the memo quotes from the report at some length.

Nov 1, 2021

9NEWS: "If you’re outside and the sun is out and the glory of fall is all around you, you don’t realize that our healthcare system is not just at a breaking point--there are places where it’s breaking," said Matthew Wynia, MD, MPH. The biggest ethical issue Colorado faces, according to Wynia, is choosing where to transfer patients and move staff, since hospitals in areas with a less vaccinated population are more overwhelmed than hospitals in areas with a higher percentage of people vaccinated against COVID-19. "We need the public to do their part as well, which means start doing the stuff that you were doing last winter when people were scared of catching this illness. I fear that people think that things are OK and they’re not OK right now. We’re not OK.”

Oct 23, 2021

THE ATLANTIC: Public-health professionals sometimes contend that grand societal problems are beyond the remit of their field. Housing is an urban-planning issue. Poverty is a human-rights issue. The argument goes that “it’s not the job of public health to be leading the revolution,” explains Daniel Goldberg, JD, PhD. As the 20th century progressed, the field moved away from the idea that social reforms were a necessary part of preventing disease and willingly silenced its own political voice. By swimming along with the changing currents of American ideology, it drowned many of the qualities that made it most effective.