public health

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  1/14/2020
  

  The Great Polio Vaccine Mess and the Lessons it Holds about Federal Coordination for Today’s COVID-19 Vaccination Effort

  by Bert Spector

  The introduction of the Salk polio vaccination offers lessons for governments trying to roll out a coronavirus vaccine in a climate of mistrust and poor distribution infrastructure. 

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• SOURCE: Foreign Affairs
  12/31/2020
  

  How U.S. Pandemic Restrictions Became a Constitutional Battlefield

  by John Fabian Witt and Kiki Manzur

  Conservative attacks on COVID-related restrictions on social gatherings are rooted in a selective and false interpretation of the history of the application of the police power to support public health. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  12/15/2020
  

  The African Roots of Inoculation in America: Saving Lives for Three Centuries

  by Gillian Brockell

  Knowledge carried by enslaved Africans supported rudimentary efforts at inoculation against smallpox in colonial Massachusetts.

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  12/15/2020
  

  The Year We Lost

  Historians consider whether the disruptions and cancellations of 2020 are a singular conjuncture of bad news or if the year has just highlighted normal patterns of life – deferral of dreams, economic privation, and uncertainty – that the less-privileged have always lived with. 

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• 12/20/2020
  

  The Plague in Ancient Athens: A Cautionary Tale for America

  by Fred Zilian

  The United States in some respects has fared better under COVID than Athens did during the plague that accompanied the Peloponnesian War: a vaccine is in sight, and our head of state survived the day's most feared disease. But in both cases, disease showed the strains and cracks of a society and political system that will be difficult to repair.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  12/13/2020
  

  Vaccinated? Show Us Your App

  Medical historian Michael Willrich says that the prospect of smartphone-based credentialing to demonstrate an individual has been vaccinated is potentially invasive of privacy and the control of health data by private interests. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  12/12/2020
  

  ‘A Fearsome Decision’: Abigail Adams Had Her Children Inoculated Against Smallpox

  Abigail Adams had justifiable fears of the primitive smallpox inoculation available in 1776, but larger fears of the disease. 

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• SOURCE: Perspectives on History
  12/9/2020
  

  Clerks Wearing Masks: Building Historical Empathy while Teaching the 1918 Influenza Epidemic

  by E. Thomas Ewing and Jeffrey S. Reznick

  "We, like many in the historical profession, spend a great deal of time asking what people in the past believed, thought, and understood, but we also can—and should—ask what people in the future might think about us and our circumstances."

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  12/6/2020
  

  How Black People Learned Not to Trust Public Health

  Times Columnist Charles M. Blow looks to scholars including historian Jim Downs to examine mistrust among Black Americans of a potential COVID vaccine; medical authorities have abused the trust and violated the consent of Black patients too often in the past for those fears to be dismissed out of hand. 

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• 12/6/2020
  

  How Venetians Invented Health Care

  by Meredith F. Small

  It's been widely discussed during this pandemic year that Venetians invented the quarantine. But the author of a new book on Venice's history of innovation argues that it was just one of the public health measures for which we can thank them.

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  12/2/2020
  

  Cicely was Young, Black and Enslaved – Her Death During an Epidemic in 1714 Has Lessons that Resonate in Today's Pandemic

  by Nicole S. Maskiell

  A gravestone marking the burial of Cicely, an enslaved teenage girl in Cambridge, Mass., points to gap between the importance of black women's labor to colonial society (especially in times of crisis like epidemics) and their remembrance in history.

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• SOURCE: NPR
  12/1/2020
  

  From Cholera To Seat Belts: History Of Americans Reacting To Public Health Messages

  Public Health historian David Rosner argues that strains of religiosity and individualism in American culture have made it difficult to win acceptance for many public health and safety measures in the past. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
  12/1/2020
  

  The Struggle to Document COVID-19 for Future Generations

  by Pamela Ballinger

  Images of suffering have been powerful spurs to humanitarian action in history, but the process has the potential to reinforce messages of fault, blame, and separation. Assembling a visual archive of the age of COVID must avoid those traps to be useful in the future. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at The Washington Post
  11-30-20
  

  History Reminds Us that Vaccines Alone Don't End Pandemics

  by E. Thomas Ewing

  Positive news about advances on a vaccine for the novel coronavirus should not be taken as a license to stop mask-wearing and social distancing argues a historian of viral pandemics. 

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• 11/15/2020
  

  Can the COVID Crisis Create a New Civilian-Military Trust in Argentina?

  by David M. K. Sheinin y Cesar R. Torres

  Many Argentinians have been suspicious of military involvement in civil affairs since the end of the country's military dictatorship in 1983. Two scholars ask if the COVID crisis presents an opportunity for healing and reimagining the military's role in Argentina.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  11/9/2020
  

  Trump Politicized COVID-19. Let’s Not Politicize The Vaccine.

  by Max Boot

  "If the Pfizer vaccine helps to free us from the threat of COVID-19, there will be plenty of credit to go around — and it won’t conform to narrow partisan categories. Reality is too messy for ideology."

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• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  11/5/2020
  

  The Pandemic Is Dragging On. Professors Are Burning Out.

  "For professors of all types, their responsibilities as teachers are causing many of them to feel pressed to meet the needs of the moment."

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  10/31/2020
  

  Stanford Study Seeks to Quantify Infections Stemming From Trump Rallies

  Stanford researchers, led by Professor B. Douglas Bernheim, the chairman of the university’s economics department, conducted a regression analysis. They compared the 18 counties where Mr. Trump held rallies with as many as 200 counties with similar demographics and similar trajectories of confirmed COVID-19 cases before the rally date.

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• SOURCE: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
  10/18/2020
  

  Last Week Tonight: The World Health Organization

  The weekly comedy-investigative program includes an assessment of the World Health Organization's past work eradicating disease in the developing world and the Trump administration's attacks on the agency (includes some vulgar language and jokes).

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  10/21/2020
  

  The Forgotten Third Amendment Could Give Pandemic-Struck America a Way Forward

  by Alexander Zhang

  Could the Third Amendment's ban on quartering of troops in private homes be expanded to establish a right to protection against pandemics? The history of troop quartering shows objections to it were closely connected with fear of disease.