Private and Controversial

The COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated how actions taken for the management of a public health emergency can bear significant implications for individual liberty, dignity and privacy. Collection of health data, contact tracing, mandatory testing, and vaccine passports are some examples of such interventions. However, these tensions are certainly not new. Nor are they limited to situations of health emergencies. The everyday interactions between the individual, the community, and the public health ecosystem raise a number of questions about how to balance the state's legitimate public health interests with the informational privacy, bodily integrity and decisional autonomy of citizens.