public health

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  9/22/2021
  

  With Students Back on Campus, Faculty Push Back Against COVID Policies They Consider Inadequate

  "Many are enjoying seeing students back on campus. But for others those scenes are fraught."

• 
• SOURCE: ABC News
  9/20/2021
  

  US COVID Death Count Surpasses Estimates of 1918 Influenza

  Historian Christopher McKnight Nichols notes "we have effective vaccines now.... the thing they most wanted in 1918, we've got. And for a lot of different reasons, we botched the response." 

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• SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
  9/17/2021
  

  Policing Religious Exemptions to Vaccines

  A lawsuit against Creighton University, a Jesuit institution, would expand the justification for religious exemptions to vaccination from explicit declarations of opposition by a religious body to any impulse of individual conscience. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  9/10/2021
  

  The Limits of My Empathy for Covid Deniers

  by Tressie McMillan Cottom

  "This is a social problem with big structural issues. That does not absolve me of my responsibility for seeing the humanity in people I vehemently disagree with, but it does make me feel less guilty about being unable to save them."

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  9/9/2021
  

  Vaccination Mandates Are an American Tradition. So Is the Backlash

  Historians Michael Willrich and Elena Conis explains the history of vaccination resistance and the civil liberties and political conflicts that have accompanied it. 

• 
• SOURCE: Substack
  9/10/2021
  

  If Fighting Terrorist Attacks Is a Government Responsibility, So Is Fighting a Killer Virus

  by Claire Potter

  "Vaccine refusers are killing their children and killing each other to support an extreme idea about human freedom that is unsupported in United States law."

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  9/7/2021
  

  The Masked Professor vs. the Unmasked Student

  "Universities are caught between the demands of their faculty for greater safety precautions, and the fear of losing students, and the revenue they bring, if schools return to another year of online education."

• 
• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  8/27/2021
  

  We’re Begging Students to Save Our Lives

  by Amy Olberding

  "We beg teenagers to think of our babies, to feel for our dead, and please not to kill us. Some of them oblige. Some do not — an alarming number do not. The university’s response so far amounts to: Beg better."

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  8/31/2021
  

  It's the Moment the Antivax Movement Has Been Waiting For

  by Tara Haelle

  The antivax movement has appropriated common-sense ideas like parental control and bodily autonomy to sow widespread fear and hostility toward the COVID-19 vaccinations.

• 
• SOURCE: Nursing Clio
  9/2/2021
  

  The Agency of the Irresponsible

  by Sarah Swedberg

  When universities bend to political pressure and adopt "personal responsibility" policies for vaccination, masking, and social distancing they give agency to the irresponsible and take it away from those who are actively working to protect public health. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  8/19/2021
  

  There is No Precedent for the Politicization of the Pandemic

  by Howard Markel

  The COVID pandemic is going to be the future baseline case study for the social impact of pandemics, and is unfortunately likely to be a cautionary tale, says a medical historian. 

• 
• 8/15/2021
  

  Children's Teeth, Collected Decades Ago, Can Show the Damage of Nuclear Testing

  by Lawrence Wittner and Joseph Mangano

  The Radiation and Public Health Project will use thousands of baby teeth collected for a discontinued 1960s study of radiation exposure to assess the health toll of nuclear testing. 

• 
• SOURCE: Governing
  8/5/2021
  

  The Long History of Vaccine Mandates

  by Lindsay M. Chervinsky

  President Biden's recent call for mandatory vaccination for federal workers follows the precedent set by George Washington's order to inoculate the Continental Army for smallpox.

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  7/12/2021
  

  Why did some Americans Seem to Hope COVID would Kill Cities?

  “Anti-urbanism is an American religion, practiced widely and frequently in ordinary times, and passionately when cities are actually in trouble,” wrote Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at N.Y.U.

• 
• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  6/29/2021
  

  AIDS Disappeared from Public View Without Ending. Will Covid-19 do the Same?

  by Dan Royles

  AIDS activism shifted from framing the epidemic as a political crisis to a medical problem, allowing the ongoing vulnerability of the poor to fade from view as pharmaceutical advances have helped control the spread and impact of HIV among the affluent. 

• 
• 6/6/2021
  

  Paying People to Get Vaccines is an Old Idea Whose Time has Come Again

  by Margaret DeLacy

  John Haygarth devised a system for rewarding working-class residents of Chester for receiving the risky smallpox inoculation and maintaining social distance afterward. The effort was largely superseded by the more effective and safer Jenner vaccination, but was a foundational public health experiment that pays dividends today.

• 
• 5/16/2021
  

  Vaccine Skeptics Should Heed George Washington’s Example

  by Robert Brent Toplin

  With the American Revolution hanging in the balance, Washington ordered the mass inoculation of the Continental Army against a smallpox pandemic. Would today's vaccine skeptics accuse him of trampling freedom? 

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  5/2/2021
  

  Germany’s Anti-Vaccination History Is Riddled With Anti-Semitism

  by Edna Bonhomme

  Antisemitism has often flared during public health crises such as pandemics; it has also attached itself to suspicion of vaccination, a trend that has been disturbingly prominent among German anti-vaxxers. 

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• 5/2/2021
  

  Remember The Essential Workers After COVID: They Deserve Better

  by Joshua B. Freeman

  All of us literally owe our lives to our essential workers.  Let’s not forget it.  Giving them a fair shake is not only a moral obligation, it will make a better city for all of us.

• 
• SOURCE: TomDispatch
  4/22/2021
  

  The Great Forgetting: Why We Forget Epidemics and Why This One Must Be Remembered

  by Nina Burleigh

  "For most Americans, the history of the 1918 flu shares space in that ever-larger tomb of oblivion with the history of other diseases of our great-grandparents’ time that vaccines have now eradicated."