The 2021 Shandong Forum, co-hosted by Shandong University and the Korean Chey Institute for Advanced Studies, was held in Qingdao from October 8-10. The theme this year was "A Shared Future: East Asia facing profound Changes Unseen in a Century". At the same time, this occasion marked the 120th anniversary of Shandong University.

The China-EU School of Law’s Executive Co-Dean Monty Silley was invited to speak on the topic of East Asian Medical Legal Systems for Dealing with Health Challenges. His presentation focused on the rule of law and human rights issues as we attempt to emerge from the pandemic of Covid-19.

Dean Silley noted how humanity successfully developed vaccinations at record speeds, but their global distribution continues to reveal huge inequalities. With UNDP low-income country vaccination rates hovering only around 3%, many East Asian countries have also lagged. At the same time, as some of these countries started opening-up more, they have seen an alarming rise in Covid cases and deaths. For example, Thailand and Vietnam each reported more Covid cases on the day of his presentation than they did for the whole year of 2020!

While vaccination rollouts have been catching up, achieving herd immunity by convincing the necessarily high proportion of people to get vaccinated is another question. Therefore, we have seen vaccine mandates being implemented in various forms around the world. These actions renew contentious legal and ethical debates weighing community health goals against personal consent under the rule of law.

Dean Silley surveyed vaccine legislation, executive directives, and related court litigation from numerous jurisdictions. After providing detailed legal analysis, he also showed how some countries have achieved high vaccination rates without compulsory mandates. This led him to offer some alternative approaches. Dean Silley suggested how behavioral economics may also be used to ‘nudge’ vaccine skeptics, as well as some anti-vaxxers, towards voluntary immunizations.