Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Viewpoints: Indoor Air Quality Vital In Covid Fight; It's Time To Stop Asking And Start Mandating Vaccines
Stat: Circumventing Covid-19 With Better Ventilation And Air Quality
Gathering outdoors has provided people a safer alternative to meeting inside during the Covid-19 pandemic. But for those who spend their days in crowded indoor spaces — workers in office buildings and industrial facilities, students in schools, and the like — how can their indoor environments be made more similar to the outdoors? With better air quality and ventilation. (Leslie Boden, Will Raderman and Patricia Fabian, 7/20)
The Washington Post: Stop Pleading With Anti-Vaxxers And Start Mandating Vaccinations
It’s time to get serious about coronavirus vaccinations. Stop pleading and start mandating. For the past six months, President Biden, joined by every public health authority in the land, has been begging Americans to get vaccinated. The “pretty, please” approach isn’t working. According to The Post’s covid-19 tracker, in the past week, daily reported covid-19 cases rose 66 percent, covid-related hospitalizations rose 28 percent, and daily reported covid-19 deaths rose 20 percent. With the delta variant spreading across the country, every single state has seen an increase in cases over the past seven days. (Max Boot, 7/19)
Los Angeles Times: It's Time To Get Tough On COVID Vaccine Evaders
Last summer, when a new, deadly wave of COVID-19 infections gripped the nation, the only solace during that dark time was that a vaccine seemed possible, if not probable, within the year. It was the light in the proverbial tunnel, as distant and weak as it may have appeared at the moment. We should have reached the end of the tunnel by now, thanks to amazing feats of science and government that developed and mass produced several COVID-19 vaccines in record time. Yet it’s still agonizingly far away because of falling demand for the abundant and free shots, despite pleas and cash giveaways to nudge vaccine holdouts. Efforts to educate skeptics about the undeniable benefits of the vaccines must continue, and the social media platforms need to do a better job at cracking down on deliberate misinformation that serves solely to stir up confusion and doubt about the vaccines — or worse. (7/20)
The New York Times: How To Reach The Unvaccinated
Late last week Michael Brendan Dougherty of National Review stirred up a mix of interest and outrage among journalists by arguing that more understanding should be extended to unvaccinated Americans, whose hesitancy about getting Pfizered or Modernafied often reflects a reasonable uncertainty and wariness after a year of shifting public-health rhetoric, blunders and misleading messaging. The alternative perspective, judging from responses to his column, regards the great mass of the unvaccinated as victims of deliberately manufactured paranoia, the blame for which can be laid partly on their own partisan self-delusion and partly on wicked actors in the right-wing media complex — from conspiracy theorists flourishing online to vaccine skeptics interviewed by Tucker Carlson to Republican politicians who have pandered to vaccine resistance. (Ross Douthat, 7/20)
The Boston Globe: Questions And Answers On The COVID-19 Vaccine
Over the last months, we in Massachusetts have been fortunate to begin to return to many experiences of normalcy. People fully vaccinated against COVID-19 no longer need to wear masks outside, many beloved local restaurants and businesses have reopened, and we are gathering together more and more to reconnect with friends and family. These experiences have been made possible by the protective power of vaccination and our continued public health measures. (7/19)
Dallas Morning News: Dallas Complained A Lot About The Fair Park Vaccine Hub, But The Results Deserve Our Respect
Now that everyone who wants a COVID-19 vaccine can easily get one, we sometimes forget what it was like just a few months ago. There were only a few thousand doses per week, tens of thousands of people on a Dallas County waiting list, and endless headaches for the public and for the county officials in charge of administering doses. (7/20)
Bloomberg: Israel: Naftali Bennett Hedges His Bets With Covid Strategy
Naftali Bennett began his term as Israel’s new prime minister praising his predecessor for the successful Covid vaccination program and promising more of the same: “Vaccinations, not lockdowns” has been his mantra. The pivot from state-mandated measures to personal responsibility was straight from Boris Johnson’s playbook. Bennett will have noticed that “Freedom Day” hasn’t gone quite as hoped in the U.K. as the delta variant interferes with plans for a carefree unlocking. Now the Israeli leader is sounding a little less British too. In reality, though, the Israeli approach is just different enough from the U.K. one to allow Bennett to claim he’s both opened up and stayed vigilant. (Zev Chafets, 7/20)
The Star Tribune: Learn The Right Lessons From The COVID Response
On July 11, this newspaper published an editorial commending to readers a book written by Andy Slavitt regarding the response to the COVID-19 epidemic. Slavitt may seem an inapt choice for such a book or editorial, given his frequent inaccurate predictions and observations regarding the course of the epidemic and his indefatigable support of suppression measures that have been shown to be largely futile and to have caused more harm than benefit to the population as a whole. An article in this paper in October noted Slavitt's support for a supposed virus-crushing — and soul-crushing — six-week complete shutdown of everything. He cited several nations that supposedly followed such a course with success, but almost every one of them, such as England, Italy, the Czech Republic, and currently Japan and Thailand, went on to have substantial waves of cases. (Kevin Roche, 7/18)
