Projects

The GHJP works on a range of areas related to health justice. Click through each header to see relevant work and projects:

Pharma Justice: Promoting access to medicines, needs-driven R&D, and transparency and integrity in clinical research

New pharmaceuticals and medical technologies are critically important to health. GHJP undertakes research and advocacy to ensure more integrity and transparency in clinical research and to bring about a more just system for the development and distribution of medicines. We believe that medicines should be available on equitable terms in all countries, and that reforms to our research and development (R&D) system are both possible, and needed, to make medicines more affordable, and to ensure that they are developed in response to health needs.

Gender, Sexuality, and Rights: Reframing Regulation and Rights for Health Justice

Rights related to gender and sexuality face both incremental progress and significant rollbacks of support in health and legal policy, with contestations often treated as constitutive of struggles between and within nations and cultures. Despite being delineated as a coherent field of rights, these struggles arise in remarkably asymmetrical ways: in some places, abortion rights are being rolled back, while gay rights are advancing; in some places, persons expressing gender and reproductive non-conformity are targeted, often through the criminal law. GHJP works in this complex and volatile area using a nuanced, multidisciplinary approach, moving between practice and scholarship to forge new alliances and provide analytics and groundwork for new policies.

Infectious Disease and Justice

Pathogens do not respect borders, and background conditions of inequality mean that certain people—particularly the poor and—predictably suffer the most when new health risks emerge. GHJP’s work in this area focuses on key structural factors associated with the transmission and effects of infectious disease, marshaling existing data, and doing new research to support public health and clinical interventions, social and political initiatives that will lessen risks and harms.

Data for Health Justice: Using Data for Good—Quantitative Modeling for Health Justice

Global health justice issues are deeply entwined with disciplines that speak in numbers, in the epidemiological and clinical toll of these diseases, and their economic costs. GHJP mobilizes a variety of disciplines from operations research and management science, epidemiology and mathematical modeling of disease, statistics and probability to investigate ways to understand key issues in global health justice and their individual and societal impacts, and to shape solutions through modeling and assessing alternatives for interventions.

Local Health Justice: Leveraging Academia in Service of Community Interests

The GHJP works on health justice not only globally but also locally, here in New Haven and Connecticut. Health inequity is a deeply rooted problem here, as it is across the United States, visible in everything from asthma rates, to violence risk, to healthcare access. Because health status tracks other forms of exclusion and privilege, we see work to improve health in marginalized communities as both a good in its own right, and as a means to build power that can have democratizing structural effects, with impacts that redound beyond health. We seek to leverage our influence and resources in support of community interests and local movements, and build and sustain mutually-beneficial collaborations across academic, activist, and community structures to advance rights and social change in greater New Haven and surrounding areas.

Youth Equity Science/YES

The Youth Equity Science/YES Project is a collaboration between mental health and human rights experts to benefit lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth. YES’s aim is to promote LGBT youth equality, health and well-being and decrease health and wellness disparities associated with stigma such as suicide, bullying, family non-acceptance, and HIV/AIDS. YES’s goal is to promote the use of evidence-based knowledge in conjunction with human rights principles of health justice and equality to address such disparities. YES’s strategy is to create a platform for the translation of scientific research bearing on LGBT youth health and wellbeing into useful practices, programs and policies and law, and to serve as a mechanism to inform research that is relevant to such efforts. While the YES Project will focus substantially on the United States, it will also encompass laws, policies and programming outside the United States and transnationally. 

COVID-19

As it unfolds, the Coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) pandemic is throwing into stark relief the deep failures and inequities in our current economic, social, legal and political orders. From our fragmented and profit-driven health care system to the absence of social safety nets, the conditions in which we live are enabling the virus to spread unchecked, with the greatest burden both from the disease itself and from the steps taken to check the virus, falling upon those with the least power. The Global Health Justice Partnership has been working with colleagues locally, nationally and internationally to respond to the health justice and human rights implications of the pandemic. Our focus is on the public and private interventions and social supports that are necessary to protect the health and rights of the most vulnerable during this immediate crisis and to build a new infrastructure of care that supports our collective wellbeing in the long-term.