“Housing security’s place in a ‘Culture of Health’: Lessons from the pandemic housing crises in the U.S. and England”
Center Director and Associate Professor Sean A. Valles, PhD, gave a seminar last month for The London School of Economics and Political Science Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method. Valles presented “Housing security’s place in a ‘Culture of Health’: Lessons from the pandemic housing crises in the U.S. and England” as part of the department’s “Conjectures and Refutations” series.
Dr. Valles has provided a summary of his talk below. A recording is available to watch on YouTube via the LSE Philosophy channel.
People experiencing homelessness had been suffering extreme health and economic hardships before the COVID-19 pandemic, and even more so during it. The notion that housing is a human right is gradually picking up momentum in both the U.S. and England. And that ethical recognition is combining with a growing set of scientific evidence of the effectiveness of “housing first” policies, which provide stable long-term housing to people experiencing homelessness, rather than shuffling people in and out of temporary shelters. Every person ethically deserves safe housing, and failing to provide this has also resulted in a system that cruelly (and at great expense) pushes suffering people into emergency rooms and prisons.
England earned praise for its “Everyone In” program, which was aimed to provide safe housing for every person experiencing homelessness beginning early in the pandemic. By contrast, cities across the U.S. continued defying CDC recommendations by bulldozing temporary encampments set up by people experiencing homelessness, including in Lansing. Meanwhile both the U.S. and England banned evictions of renters who fell behind on their rent during the pandemic, but both also failed to make realistic long-term plans for how to secure housing and income for people who have no way of paying past-due rent once the eviction bans expire. On both sides of the Atlantic, the pandemic inspired governments to stumble toward recognizing how essential housing is for good health in general and also dealing with this fact. The challenge now is to keep up the momentum, and push for universal housing, since trying to survive without secure housing was already difficult before the pandemic, and will remain so after it ends.
This year’s presidential debates drew attention to gun violence in Chicago, as well as the (merely?) short-term reversal in the decades-long decline in US violent crimes. In the process, it reignited the smoldering political dispute over whether gun violence is a public health problem.
Image description: A bullet hole in a mirror. There are cracks extending out from the bullet, and a mirror shows the reflection of blue sky with clouds. Image source: Flickr user Jo Naylor.
Neglecting the medical and public health aspects of gun violence is a tragic lost opportunity to understand and respond to gun injuries and deaths. For example, only some jurisdictions require special permits to purchase handguns, but public health data indicate that adopting such polices helps to prevent both suicides and homicides. Thanks to NRA lobbying (again), the Centers for Disease Control is prohibited from doing any research that serves “to advocate or promote gun control.” The researchers who dare to work in the under-funded field “face emotional and financial demands” (Pettit 2016). Meanwhile, the 14-year-old National Violent Death Reporting System, the federal database for gun violence, still has zero data from ten states.
“Health in all policies”
Though its hands are partly tied, the CDC endorses the mainstream public health position that we must promote “health in all policies.” I.e. gun policies are (failed) health polices because the US continues to be plagued by gunshot wounds. Health is shaped by all manner of different causes, including laws and policies that were not explicitly designed to be health policies. For example, local commercial/residential zoning laws are public health issues. Why? Because they control the distribution of supermarkets, fast food restaurants and liquor stores in each neighborhood, affecting what the local population can/does eat and drink. Poorly designed city zoning laws are public healthproblems because they keep nutritious foods inaccessible and less nutritious alternatives abundant.
‘But, if guns are a public health problem then that would mean…’
The notion of promoting “health in all policies” has—surprisingly—faced some of the staunchest resistance from professional public health ethicists. Perhaps best illustrating the divide, the American Public Health Association has co-signed a letter with 57 other medical and public health organizations, calling for expanded gun violence monitoring data and gun control measures. Meanwhile, the ethics section editor of the association’s journal has opposed adding crime and other social ills “to the public health agenda”—doing so would make “public health… so broad as to be meaningless” (Rothstein, 2009). Similarly, an influential public health justice text resists calls to treat crime, war and various other social problems as public health problems, arguing that despite the desirability of a “broad scope of public health,” recognizing them as such would leave public health with “no real core, no institutional, disciplinary or social boundaries” (Powers and Faden, 2006).
Outside of the bioethics community, physician and free-market economics advocate Paul Hsieh echoes the idea that treating guns as a public health problem makes ‘public health’ unrecognizably broad, and it also “diverts us from genuine public health threats.” He scoffs that next we could even start thinking of issues like minimum wage and poverty as public health problems. Funny he should mention it; in fact, small differences in income are associated with drastic differences in life expectancy. An American man in the richest 1% has a life expectancy 14 years longer than a man in the poorest 1%! We now know that the causes of death and illness are complex and far-reaching—we must resist the urge to squeeze “public health” until its boundaries are neatly compressed and its efforts are hopelessly hobbled.
When the American Medical Association issued a statement in July that it considers guns “a public health crisis,” Keith Ablow, a member of the “Fox News Medical A-Team,” retorted that we don’t really know how many homicides could be prevented with gun control. But then he went on to say “they’re going to eat away at gun rights with medical research.” Like the NRA’s efforts to restrict CDC gun violence research, it appears that Ablow is very worried about what gun violence public health data would reveal. It would seem that he finds gun violence research more frightening than… gun violence.
It doesn’t have to be this way
But isn’t it foolish to think the medical and public health communities could help with a massive social problem like gun violence? It’s the reply I hear most often, and it always strikes me as an odd moment of pessimism. Odd, that is, in light of the widely-embraced moonshots of eradicating smallpox from every population on the planet (done!), and spending incredible sums to find treatments for the innumerable and mysterious varieties of cancer (optimistic!). Why do I so often see resigned shrugs when I insist we can make public health progress in the problem of Americans using guns to kill ourselves and each other almost five times more often than our Canadian neighbors? After all, when pediatricians talk to parents about gun safety during a child’s checkup, the parents become more likely to use a gun lock, which substantially reduces risks of gun accidents and gun suicides. Sounds like a good start.
We can do better, and some of my bioethics colleagues have been producing excellent work, making the case for why the deep-rooted social problems (violence, poverty, etc.) causing our public health ills must become national public health priorities, and also priorities for individual physicians. The first step though, is admitting that the roughly 100,000 people shot in the US each year each have gun violence medical problems, and that we in the US have a gun violence public health problem.
Sean A. Valles, PhD, is an Associate Professor in Lyman Briggs College and the Department of Philosophy at Michigan State University. He is a philosopher specializing in ethical and evidentiary issues in contemporary population health sciences.
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The 3rd Annual Great Lakes Biorepository Network (GLBRN) Scientific Meeting was held on October 28, 2016 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Center Director and Professor Dr. Tom Tomlinson spoke on “Preferences for Biobank Consent Policy are Sensitive to Concerns about Future Research Uses.”
The current research ethics framework gauges the level of ethical protections to the degree of risk to the participant. The lower the risk, the less stringent the requirements for informed consent; when the risk is virtually zero, as with the research uses of de-identified biospecimens and related clinical and demographic data, it is no longer research on a human “subject.”
This framework forgets why people donate their specimens and data to biobanks. They are not merely concerned with what later research will do to or for them. They are hoping their donation may do some good; and correlatively, assuming that it will do no wrong, in ways they would find morally concerning:
Some research might threaten a donor’s world view –such as research to better understand human evolution and history.
Some donors might be concerned by research that might lead to the stigmatization of others –such as research that looks at genes associated with violence.
Or some research may be contrary to the moral, cultural, or political values of the donor – such as research related to abortion or research leading to large commercial profits.
To emphasize the contrasts with the conventional framework, Dr. Tomlinson and his colleagues call these people’s non-welfare interests in later research uses of their donations.
In the talk Dr. Tomlinson presented evidence that such concerns affect people’s preferences among various biobank consent policies, drawn from both a national survey that his research team conducted in 2014 and a series of democratic deliberations held in 2015. The evidence shows that the more people are aware of the range of possible research uses of biobank donations that might be of concern to them or others, the more negative their attitudes are toward blanket consent. In this consent, a donor gives permission up front to any future uses that the biobank would allow, without any further consent or information provided. This is the most common form of biobank consent, but their research shows that a bare majority finds it “acceptable,” and a sizeable minority (38%) think it’s the “worst” option among those presented. Interestingly, the team found similar attitudes expressed toward specific, study-by-study consent, the option that gives each donor the most control over later research uses.
This post is a part of our 
MSU Bioethics 