public health

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• SOURCE: TIME
  2/25/2021
  

  With Free Medical Clinics and Patient Advocacy, the Black Panthers Created a Legacy in Community Health That Still Exists Amid COVID-19

  by Olivia B. Waxman and Arpita Aneja

  Sociologist and social movement historian Alondra Nelson explains that Black Panther Party community action to provide health services grew out of a mistrust of mainstream health institutions' willingness to direct resources to the needs of poor Black communities, a mistrust that remains today. 

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  2/24/2021
  

  Many Black Americans Aren’t Rushing to Get the COVID-19 Vaccine – A Long History of Medical Abuse Suggests Why

  by Esther Jones

  From J. Marion Sims to the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments to the exploitation of Henrietta Lacks' DNA, there are ample historical reasons for Black Americans to feel that medical authorities are unconcerned with their safety and mistrust new COVID vaccines. Acknowledging this history is essential for public health authorities to gain trust. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  2/23/2021
  

  Having Vaccines Alone isn’t Enough to Defeat COVID-19

  by Joyce Chaplin

  Early efforts at smallpox innoculation showed the importance of social and political factors in making new medical technologies effective. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  2/12/2021
  

  Medical Racism has Shaped U.S. Policies for Centuries

  by Deirdre Cooper Owens

  Medical racism over centuries has "created a system of belief and practice that allowed doctors to place blame on Black people for not having the same health outcomes as White people."

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  2/15/2021
  

  Eroding Trust, Spreading Fear: The Historical Ties Between Pandemics And Extremism

  Historian John Fea says that the COVID-19 pandemic is one of a long line of disease outbreaks encouraging paranoid thinking and a siege mentality. 

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• SOURCE: The Marshall Project
  5/14/2021
  

  I Survived Prison During The AIDS Epidemic. Here’s What It Taught Me About Coronavirus

  by Richard Rivera

  Like the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, imprisoned people at risk of COVID-19 find that suspicion, paranoia and isolation have taken the place of meaningful support. 

• 
• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  2/9/2021
  

  What’s at Stake in the Fight Over Reopening Schools

  by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

  In cities like Chicago, parents anxious to return children to school have blamed teachers' unions. The historian and New Yorker columnist argues that some proponents of reopening are using racial equity arguments in bad faith while ignoring the gross racial inequalities that characterized schooling-as-usual before the pandemic and the work of teachers' unions to fight it.

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  2/7/2021
  

  National Black HIV/AIDS Awareness Day Reminds Us of the Deep Costs of Inequality

  by Dan Royles

  "This history shows us that biomedical interventions such as antiretrovirals to treat HIV or the vaccine against the coronavirus yield some progress in the fight against epidemic disease, but do little to alter the underlying inequities that make some communities more vulnerable to illness in the first place."

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  1/25/2021
  

  Five Past Vaccine Drives and How They Worked

  "Scientists developed vaccines less than a year after Covid-19 was identified, a reflection of remarkable progress in vaccine technology. But progress in vaccine distribution is another story."

• 
• SOURCE: Smithsonian
  1/26/2021
  

  History Shows Americans Have Always Been Wary of Vaccines

  Medical historian Keith Wailoo addressed a recent Smithsonian webinar on the history of American hostility to vaccination, joining public health experts. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  1/26/2021
  

  COVID-19 Dashboards are Vital, yet Flawed, Sources of Public Information

  by Jacqueline Wernimont

  "Public health dashboards, like our many COVID-19 dashboards, are unusual in the history of dashboards in that they share information but not in a way that allows ordinary people to take action."

• 
• 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. 

• 
• 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. 

• 
• 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.

• 
• 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."

• 
• 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.