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Potemkin Plans: What are the ethical duties of planners asked to give false assurances?

Explore the ethical obligations of planners tasked with creating elaborate yet unachievable public health emergency preparedness plans. Analyze the impact of these plans on risk communication and community safety.

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Potemkin Plans: What are the ethical duties of planners asked to give false assurances?

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  1. Potemkin Plans: What are the ethical duties of planners asked to givefalse assurances? Edward P. Richards, JD MPHProgram in Law, Science and Public HealthLSU School of Law http://biotech.law.lsu.edu

  2. Potemkin Village • After Grigori Aleksandrovich Potemkin, who had elaborate fake villages constructed for Catherine the Great's tours of the Ukraine and the Crimea. • (Possibly just a good story, which I assumed, but this is what the dictionary says.)

  3. Potemkin Plans • Elaborate plans for public health emergency preparedness that cannot be carried out because of lack of staff, resources, political will, or competence, or any combination of the above.

  4. Is This a New Problem? • Enemy of the People, Ibsen (1882) • Should be required reading in public health • Unsupportable plans are nothing new to government, or to public health • Emergency preparedness is nothing new

  5. What is New: 9/11 • Emergency preparedness becomes a national security issue • National security means federal command and control • The militarization of emergency response • Federal push down requiring elaborate plans on every crisis de jure, with federal programmatic funding depending on the right answers in the plan

  6. What Do These Plans Say? • The plans have to address all the federal target issues and have to say that the state and localities are prepared to carry out the functions • State legislators do the same to their own state and local governments

  7. What is the Structural Problem? • National is the wrong level for emergency response • All state and local public health, police, and other first responders are already committed about 110% • There have been net cuts in most programs as emergency response has been added • Existing problems like crime and disease control do not go away during disasters

  8. Why Does It Matter? • It does not work • We can argue about this, but it is the minor point • It distorts risk communication and leaves communities at greater risk

  9. Katrina Examples • The core problem is not fighting mother nature • If all the emergency prep had worked, not much would have changed • What has changed? • We have lots more plans • They do not change anything about the risk • They convince people that it is OK to go back and do the same thing

  10. Where Does this Leave the Experts in the Agency? • You know this will not work • Do you speak up? • What happens if you do? • What is the long term impact on agencies and policy? • Is this like Vaclav Havel's work on being a write in the Communist block? • Should this be the #1 public health law ethics issue?

  11. Should we have mechanisms to let people speak out? • Most state whistleblower laws do not work • What about hot lines like we use for fraud and abuse?

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