Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Longer Looks, Part 1: Interesting Reads You Might Have Missed
The New York Times: The Race For A Super-Antibody Against The Coronavirus
Even as vaccines are hailed as our best hope against the coronavirus, dozens of scientific groups are working on an alternate defense: monoclonal antibodies. These therapies shot to prominence just this month after President Trump got an infusion of an antibody cocktail made by Regeneron and credited it for his apparent recovery, even calling it a “cure.” Monoclonal antibodies are distilled from the blood of patients who have recovered from the virus. Ideally, antibodies infused early in the course of infection — or even before exposure, as a preventive — may provide swift immunity. (Mandavilli, 10/12)
The New York Times: The First Covid Vaccine Will Not Make Life Normal Again
The United States may be within months of a profound turning point in the country’s fight against the coronavirus: the first working vaccine. Demonstrating that a new vaccine was safe and effective in less than a year would shatter the record for speed, the result of seven-day work weeks for scientists and billions of dollars of investment by the government. Provided enough people can get one, the vaccine may slow a pandemic that has already killed a million people worldwide. (Zimmer, 10/12)
The Atlantic: What Strength Really Means When You’re Sick
In the Western world, bouts of illness are regularly described as “battles.” Viruses and other pathogens are “enemies” to be “beaten.” Patients are encouraged to “be strong” and praised for being “fighters.” “It’s so embedded in our nature to give encouragement in that way,” says Esther Choo, an emergency physician at Oregon Health and Science University, “but it’s language that we try not to use in health care.” ... Equating disease with warfare, and recovery with strength, means that death and disability are linked to failure and weakness. That “does such a disservice to all of the families who have lost loved ones, or who are facing long-term consequences,” says Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Brown University. Like so much else about the pandemic, the strength-centered rhetoric confuses more than it clarifies, and reveals more about America’s values than the disease currently plaguing it. (Yong, 10/9)
The Atlantic: How To Avoid A Winter COVID Catastrophe
What month is this again? Hundreds of thousands of deaths since the pandemic began in March, we seem to be right back where we started, like passengers trapped on a demonic carousel. Everything could still get worse. This week, Anthony Fauci warned of a new surge in cases, as Americans move from the virus-dispersing outdoors into more crowded and less-ventilated public spaces in colder months. Or everything could get better. Thanks largely to new treatments and more knowledge about this virus, hospitalization-fatality rates have declined across Europe and the United States. As a result, new surges are less likely to re-create the springtime spike in deaths. Individuals are also far more conscientious and alert to the risks. (Thompson, 10/12)
The Wall Street Journal: Lessons For The Next Pandemic—Act Very, Very Quickly
One of the biggest lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic is that speed matters. The window of opportunity to find and stop a rapidly spreading virus is vanishingly small and intolerant of mistakes. “Once you get behind the curve on these epidemics, it is really difficult to turn it around,” said Jeremy Farrar , director of the Wellcome Trust, which funds health-related research. “Acting late is a disaster.” (McKay, 10/11)
The Washington Post: Medieval Europeans Didn’t Understand How The Plague Spread. Their Response Wasn’t So Different From Ours Now.
When the new disease first arrived, little was clear beyond the fact that it killed with terrifying speed. Near-certain death trailed the first symptoms by four days or less. The doctors were helpless. This city was soon overwhelmed with corpses. Workers in church yards dug pits down to the water table, layering bodies and dirt, more bodies and dirt. One writer of the time compared the mass graves to “lasagna.” Seven centuries later, the plague in Europe stands as an example of a pandemic at its worst — what happens when so many people die so quickly that some foresee the end of the human race. Few places were hit harder than Florence, whose population in 1348 was cut by at least a third and possibly far more. (Harlan and Pitrelli, 10/15)
The Atlantic: Schools Aren't Super-Spreaders
Fear and bad press slowed down or canceled school reopenings elsewhere. Many large urban school districts chose not to open for in-person instruction, even in places with relatively low positivity rates. Chicago, L.A., Houston—all remote, at least so far. It’s now October. We are starting to get an evidence-based picture of how school reopenings and remote learning are going (those photos of hallways don’t count), and the evidence is pointing in one direction. Schools do not, in fact, appear to be major spreaders of COVID-19. (Oster, 10/9)
The Washington Post: Tips For Safely Visiting Playgrounds During The Coronavirus
Running, jumping and climbing are a big part of being a kid — and for parents, it’s probably better for all that activity to happen on a playground, rather than the living room furniture. But it hasn’t been easy to do that during this very housebound year. Public playgrounds were shut down, along with everything else, under the stay-at-home orders issued at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. When they reopened in the D.C. region during the summer, parents and caregivers were left to decide whether it was safe to return to the monkey bars and slides. (Chapin, 10/8)
The New York Times: She Hunts Viral Rumors About Real Viruses
In late September, Heidi Larson, an anthropologist and the founder of the Vaccine Confidence Project in London, sat on a Zoom call with the project team for Verified, a United Nations-led group that is working to combat a rising tide of misinformation about potential vaccines for Covid-19.Dr. Larson, 63, is arguably the world’s foremost rumor manager. She has spent two decades in war torn, poor and unstable countries around the globe, as well as in rich and developed ones, striving to understand what makes people hesitant to take vaccines. She is obsessed with the origin and evolution of rumors, which she calls “collective problem solving,” and has come to see most anti-vaxxers — a term she considers too oppositional — not as uneducated, science-denying individualists but as people with genuine questions and doubts in search of guidance. “This is a public cry to say, ‘Is anyone listening?’ she writes in her recently released book “Stuck: How Vaccine Rumors Start and Why they Don’t Go Away.” (Anderson, 10/13)
