Is It a Crime to Mishandle a Public Health Response?
Bodies being buried on New York’s Hart Island, where the Department of Corrections is dealing with more burials amid the coronavirus outbreak, April 2020. LUCAS JACKSON/REUTERS
As the new coronavirus disease, Covid-19, continues to threaten lives and livelihoods around the world, many people are seeking to hold government and corporate leaders to account for their blunders during the pandemic. But in the United States and many other countries, public health malpractice is a relatively underdeveloped area of the law, and it will take legislators some time to remedy that.