Viewpoints: Lessons On How To Defeat Public Health Crisis In US; Pros, Cons Of States’ Vaccine Rollouts

Stat: Public Health Is Being Undermined. These 10 Actions Can Restore It 
The year since the first Covid-19 case was identified in the United States has been one of unthinkable losses and inexcusable failures. From the beginning, testing was marred by glitches, rigid rules, and delays. Public health experts were sidelined. And the risks of the disease were downplayed. (Michelle A. Williams, 2/5)

JAMA: When Physicians Engage In Practices That Threaten The Nation’s Health
Among the ways in which science-based public health evidence has been dismissed in the US is the replacement of highly experienced experts advising national leaders with persons who appear to have been chosen because of their willingness to support government officials’ desire to discount the significance of the pandemic. A leading example was the elevation of Scott Atlas, MD, a neuroradiologist, who left a position in academic medicine in 2012 to become a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution (a public policy think tank affiliated with Stanford University), to the White House Coronavirus Task Force. (Philip A. Pizzo, David Spiegel, Michelle M. Mello, 2/4)

The Atlantic: America’s Soviet-Style Vaccine Rollout
If you are the child of elderly parents in parts of the United States right now, and if you are trying to get them a COVID-19 vaccine, you are living in a shortage economy, a world of queues and rumors, a shadowy land of favoritism and incompetence—a world not unlike the world of the very late, very stifling, Brezhnev-era Soviet Union. Picture the scene: We’re on opposite sides of the country, but at 3:59 p.m. eastern time, my sisters and I are sitting in front of our respective laptops, poised to start clicking refresh, refresh, refresh on the website of Holy Cross Hospital in Montgomery County, Maryland. Every few days at 4 p.m.,the site releases a new batch of COVID-19 vaccine appointments, and we’re hoping to score two for our parents. (Anne Applebaum, 2/5)

Bloomberg: Covid-19 Vaccine Distribution Should Focus On Pandemic Hot Spots
Figuring out how to combine science with fairness in Covid-19 vaccine distribution is a tricky puzzle. Science can help predict how to distribute limited doses to minimize overall deaths, but that means acting fast, which might compromise fairness. That’s how we end up with outrage when hospital administrators get shots ahead of nursing home residents, or, as The Atlantic reports, offspring ahead of their elderly parents. Perfection is impossible. But there’s a way to do justice to both science and ethics: Focus vaccines on geographic hot spots and the elderly. Experts say both are important — and getting the vaccines to the hard-hit areas could correct racial disparities that are already appearing in the early rollout. (Faye Flam, 2/4)

The Wall Street Journal: How To Ration Vaccines
Whenever the government is in charge of allocating a scarce good in high demand, there will be rationing and political jockeying. So it is with vaccines as political brawls are breaking out in states over who should be next in line for shots. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recommended prioritizing shots based on occupation and health factors, but its guidelines are arbitrary and states don’t have to follow them. After nursing-home residents and health-care workers, the CDC says priority should go to those over age 75 and an expansive list of “frontline essential workers. Then come people 65 to 74 years old, as well as ages 16 to 64 with unspecified “underlying medical conditions which increase the risk of serious” complications plus “essential workers.” (2/4)

The New York Times: It’s Time To Trust China’s And Russia’s Vaccines
While the richest countries in the world are grappling with shortages of Covid-19 vaccines, some of the poorest worry about getting vaccines at all. Yet a solution to both problems may be hiding in plain sight: vaccines from China and Russia, and soon, perhaps, India. Chinese and Russian vaccines were initially dismissed in Western and other global media, partly because of a perception that they were inferior to the vaccines produced by Moderna, Pfizer-BioNtech or AstraZeneca. And that perception seemed to stem partly from the fact that China and Russia are authoritarian states. But evidence has been accumulating for a while that the vaccines from those countries work well, too. (Achal Prabhala and Chee Yoke Ling, 2/. )

The Wall Street Journal: The ‘Universal Vaccination’ Chimera 
Each stage of the American Covid-19 pandemic has been marked by a singular public-health message that crowded out all other perspectives. From early calls to “crush the curve” with shutdowns and pleas to stay at home, then to claims that face masks would end the pandemic, these messaging strategies have sowed unrealistic expectations and delayed public acceptance of reality. The most recent message is “universal vaccination,” an aspiration whose unattainability may further delay the country’s return to social and economic normalcy. How did we arrive at this point in the pandemic? (Joseph A. Ladapo, 2/4)

Stat: NFL Should Discourage People From Indoor Super Bowl Parties 
One of the cruelest aspects of Covid-19 is the danger it poses for joyous group gatherings that bring together people of all ages and backgrounds. The Thanksgiving and December holidays, for example, contributed to a surge in transmission that led to an all-time high in case counts in the U.S. The Super Bowl could do the same. (Zach Binney and Kathleen Bachynski, 2/4)

Stat: A Buddy System Can Help Doctors And Nurses Get Through Covid-19 
Remember outings in elementary school or at camp? You were probably paired with another kid about your age and size whose hand you held. The buddy system made losing someone much less likely to happen. (Lloyd I. Sederer, 2/5)

Los Angeles Times: Start Reopening California Schools. Now
The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says schools can reopen safely even if teachers aren’t vaccinated. So does California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Southern California pediatricians are calling on Los Angeles-area schools to switch, now, to in-person learning. In other words, it is time to start reopening California schools. As much as reasonably possible, teachers and other staff who are in daylong contact with students should be given more access to COVID-19 vaccines. Now that Blue Shield is in charge of dispensing doses, it should consider earmarking some of those for school districts. But at the moment, there isn’t enough vaccine for all the teachers, nor the many other essential workers in agricultural fields, supermarkets and the like who have worked their jobs in person since the beginning of the pandemic. That’s not to mention the people whose age, health or living conditions put them at special risk. (2/5)