 During a pandemic, no one’s health is fully in their own hands. I wrote about how individualism is still sabotaging the pandemic response, and how it has been accentuated by vaccinations and the CDC’s recent guidance. Our collective problem still exists & has been even more heavily shifted onto the most vulnerable. This piece has 3 parts. Part 1 looks at why vaccines reduce but don’t solve the pandemic’s collective problem. Inequities in access, the variants, & individualistic attitudes all shunt that problem onto the unvaccinated 48%. Part 2 is about the CDC’s new mask guidance. I’ve laid out its supporters’ strongest arguments & why critics think they’re wrong. Ultimately, I think it comes down to this: Public health is meant to *center* equity. These guidelines center privilege. Part 3 looks at individualism throughout public-health’s entire history—why epidemiology became overly focused on individual risk & why it is swinging back to a societal view. This historical tension is vital for understanding what's happening now. I also have two non-pandemic stories for you. First, two neuroscientists spent years identifying a strange phenomenon in the brain, and they told me they don’t know why it happens, what it means, how the brain copes, or how much of the brain behaves in this way. Second, a feel-good story about a viral disease. A decades-long effort to infuse mosquitoes with a virus-blocking microbe culminated in a trial where dengue incidence fell by 77% in one of the most dengue-prone cities around. - E PS: I won a Pulitzer.  | 
No comments:
Post a Comment