Tipping the Scales for Public Health (Eric Ip Profiled in HKU Bulletin)

"Tipping the Scales for Public Health"
Eric Ip
HKU Bulletin
Published in November 2024

Pandemics, vaccination programmes and other public health measures cannot succeed without good legal regimes. Professor Eric Ip Chi-yeung presents the case.

In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government announced that it was “following the science” in implementing severe interventions. The approach sounded reasonable, but soon revealed serious limitations, particularly in regard to people’s freedoms and mental health. Similarly, in Hong Kong, stringent interventions, such as mandatory masking and quarantine, were initially appropriate, but over time, with vaccinations and community immunity, they seemed unduly restrictive.

Professor of Law and public health bioethicist Eric Ip Chi-yeung, who is Co-Director of the Centre for Medical Ethics and Law, argues that policymakers tend to forget that the rule of law is as important to public health as science, in his new book The Law and Regulation of Public Health: Global Perspectives on Hong Kong.

“My book has two general messages. The first is that all the incredible achievements in public health during the 20th century were made possible by law, whether it be criminal law to punish those who do not wear seatbelts or administrative law to empower certain public authorities to enforce sanitation policies, administer immunisation programmes, and so forth,” he said.

“The second message is that while we need the guidance of scientists in making public health decisions, to rely exclusively on them would be woefully inadequate. Science can’t answer the crucial questions that governments face such as the trade-offs in the social relationships between the individual, the population and the state. During a lockdown, an appropriate balance must be struck between respiratory health and other dimensions of human flourishing, such as familial love, friendship, mental well-being, and economic stability.”

The Hong Kong case

His book outlines why and how the rule of law should be given its due place in protecting mental and physical health. Professor Ip chose Hong Kong as a case study because...

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