Time for an Ethics Refresh? | The Turning Point

Imagine it is the year 2025. The Covid-19 pandemic is now a few years behind us with the whole world having been vaccinated successfully. Life is returning to normal, even as global travel has not quite returned to pre-2020 levels.

And then imagine that in January of 2025 news emerges of a novel coronavirus outbreak in Uganda. Within weeks it becomes clear that the new virus, previously not found in humans, is spreading rapidly, and may have a case fatality rate that is higher than that of Covid-19. The world starts bracing for a new pandemic.

Meanwhile, scientists announce that they have, using the widely available viral sequence, created an mRNA vaccine that they believe will be safe in humans, and efficacious. We can have phase 1 and phase 2 safety trials completed by May. A large-scale, phase 3 effectiveness trial, enrolling tens of thousands of volunteers, will deliver results by December 2025.

Read the full post on The Turning Point.

Reflecting on the themes of the COVID moment | The Healthiest Goldfish

Because much of the COVID crisis has been about dealing with the pandemic in real time as it has unfolded, there has been little time to reflect on the broader themes of what we have been through. We are now in a moment when we have been living with this challenge for over a year, a year which has taught many lessons about the nature of the virus and the society into which it emerged. It strikes me that this is a good time, then, to look back, to reflect, and to discuss key themes which emerged during the pandemic. That is why last week, in conjunction with National Public Health Week, we hosted a series of Healthiest Goldfish Conversations. At these conversations, we connected (virtually) with readers from across the world, to discuss the issues addressed in this newsletter, and to express a vision for what the pursuit of health could look like in a post-COVID future. Thank you to all who joined us for these conversations; it was a pleasure to connect with you, to learn from your perspectives. At these conversations, certain points emerged, points which have come to define our experience of the pandemic. In today’s essay, I will aim to address these themes, with the goal of informing broader reflections about the overarching narrative of the pandemic.

A quick “housekeeping” note before I do. The many new faces present at these conversations caused me to reflect that it might be worth reintroducing myself to those who have only recently subscribed to The Healthiest Goldfish. I am a physician, epidemiologist, and Dean of the Boston University School of Public Health. I started my career as a doctor, and most of my academic career has been in population health. Much of that has been concerned with a focus on mitigating the factors which generate sickness, moving beyond addressing downstream effects (more on this here). I have since pursued a focus on the social, economic, and political influences that shape health, with an emphasis on trying to inform a scholarship of consequence, to maximize health for the greatest number of people.

Read the full piece on The Healthiest Goldfish.

The New Us? | The Turning Point

History teaches that population-wide behavioral patterns change infrequently, and slowly. After all, little changed in how we behaved after the last global disease disruption, the flu pandemic of 1968, and perhaps most dramatically, societal behavioral changes after the 1918 flu pandemic were few and far between. What is most striking about how we act in the future is how similar our behavior looks to what it was like in the past, and that is true whether we have lived through a national trauma or not.

What did change after the 1918 flu pandemic was our appreciation of the need to move beyond considering health as an exclusively individual responsibility, and to set up the structures needed to help promote health collectively. A number of countries created health ministries after the 1918 pandemic and centralized healthcare delivery schemes, which unfolded in different ways in different nations. Russia, for example, was first to follow the 1918 flu pandemic with public healthcare, funded through state-run insurance. The UK, France, and Germany did much the same soon after. In 1922, the League of Nations Health Committee and Health Sections were established—forerunners of the World Health Organization (WHO).

Read the full piece on The Turning Point.

Fear in a year of pandemic | The Healthiest Goldfish

I am afraid of a lot of things, though probably not more than the average person. I really do not like small closed spaces, and I have a disproportionate fear that any ache and pain can become a terrible illness. I fear economic insolvency. And I have been thinking a fair bit about these fears in the time of a global pandemic. Fundamentally, I have been trying to ask myself: what role does (or should) fear play in our decision-making? How do we reckon with the role fear plays in shaping our choices?

If you live in the US, your odds of being killed by a foreign-born terrorist on American soil are one in 3.64 million. This places risk of death from terrorism far below that of other causes of death, such as, for example, drowning, which is fifth among leading causes of unintentional injury death in the US. Yet drowning risk has not shaped our politics and society for decades, motivated sweeping legislation like The Patriot Act, or helped provide justification for an annual defense budget of roughly $700 billion. This is arguably because drowning, while more widespread, does not receive the same publicity as terror attacks, allowing terrorism to generate a fear disproportionate to the risk it poses. 

Read the full piece on The Healthiest Goldfish.

Liberty and health? | The Healthiest Goldfish

I was in New York City on September 11, 2001. I remember the event and its aftermath. I recall that the fear in the city was palpable. In the days after the attacks, I started to see this fear reflected at the national, political level, among lawmakers, and eventually in the laws they passed. The Patriot Act, passed with near-unanimous support in the Senate, emerged from this climate of fear.

There is much about the Patriot Act which has since been rethought. It has been seen as at best an overreach and at worst Constitutionally dubious, leading to no-fly lists and the discriminatory targeting of Muslims. Given how controversial it has become, it is important to remember how reasonable the Act seemed at the time it was passed, how, gripped as we were by fear, we were able to see its broad provisions for the pursuit of terrorists as a rational response to the threat we seemed to face.

Nearly two decades after September 11, 2001, March 2020 put us in a similar state of fear, with the emergence of a novel pathogen that would eventually reach a point where it would kill each day roughly as many Americans as 9/11 did. As the new coronavirus swept the world, the fear of it was amplified across a range of media. Headlines from that time reflect how quickly we came to see the virus as a threat:

“Experts worry about pandemic as coronavirus numbers increase: report,” in Fox News on February 3, 2020.

Read the full piece on The Healthiest Goldfish.