Public Health
How One State’s Public Health Defunding Led to Vaccination Chaos
ST. LOUIS — Missourians have driven hours to find vaccines in rural counties — at least those with cars and the time. Tens of thousands of doses are waiting to be distributed, slowly being rolled out in a federal long-term care program. Waitlists are hundreds of thousands of people long. Black residents are getting left […]
KHN’s ‘What the Health?’: Getting Down to Work at HHS
Can’t see the audio player? Click here to listen on PRX. As questions swirl about the covid vaccine made by AstraZeneca, public health experts are worried the confusion could create more doubts among people already hesitant to get a vaccine. Meanwhile, the first Senate-confirmed officials are settling into their offices at the Department of Health and […]
Nosing In on Kids Who Had Covid and Lost Their Sense of Smell
Orange. Eucalyptus. Lavender. Peppermint. Doctors at Children’s Hospital Colorado and Seattle Children’s Hospital will use scents like these to treat children who lost their sense of smell to covid-19. Parents will attend clinics and go home with a set of essential oils for their child to sniff twice a day for three months. Clinicians will […]
Inmates’ Distrust of Prison Health Care Fuels Distrust of Covid Vaccines
One November night in a Missouri prison, Charles Graham woke his cellmate of more than a dozen years, Frank Flanders, saying he couldn’t breathe. Flanders pressed the call button. No one answered, so he kicked the door until a guard came. Penny Kopp and son Frank Flanders took this photo on one of Kopp’s last […]
Stop Blaming Tuskegee, Critics Say. It’s Not an ‘Excuse’ for Current Medical Racism.
For months, journalists, politicians and health officials — including New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Dr. Anthony Fauci — have invoked the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study to explain why Black Americans are more hesitant than white Americans to get the coronavirus vaccine. “It’s ‘Oh, Tuskegee, Tuskegee, Tuskegee,’ and it’s mentioned every single time,” said Karen […]
Birx Joins Air-Cleaning Industry Amid Land Grab for Billions in Federal Covid Relief
The former top White House coronavirus adviser under President Donald Trump, Dr. Deborah Birx, has joined an air-cleaning company that built its business, in part, on technology that is now banned in California due to health hazards. The company is one of many in a footrace to capture some of the $193 billion in federal […]
Indiana School Goes Extra Mile to Help Vulnerable Kids Weather Pandemic
After covid-19 forced Olivia Goulding’s Indiana middle school to switch back to remote learning late last year, the math teacher lost contact with many of her students. So she and some colleagues came up with a plan: visiting them under the guise of dropping off Christmas gifts. One day in December, they set out with […]
‘Press 1 for English’: Vaccination Sign-Ups Prove Daunting for Speakers of Other Languages
[UPDATED April 9: After publication of this article, Virginia officials on March 29 added language options for callers to select on the state’s vaccine pre-registration hotline, including Arabic, Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin), Korean and Vietnamese. Those languages are among the most widely spoken non-English languages in the state, besides Spanish. The “press 2” phone line option […]
So You’re Vaccinated Against Covid. Now What?
As you surely know, this country’s covid vaccination effort has been plagued by major birth pangs: registration snafus, poor communication, faulty data and a scant supply of vaccine — all exacerbated by inequitable allocation, alleged political favoritism and unseemly jockeying for shots. Still, as of Friday, over 118 million shots had gone into arms, and […]
The Hype Has Faded, but Don’t Count Out Convalescent Plasma in Covid Battle
Six months after it was controversially hailed by Trump administration officials as a “breakthrough” therapy to fight the worst effects of covid-19, convalescent plasma appears to be on the ropes. The treatment that infuses blood plasma from recovered covid patients into people newly infected in hopes of boosting their immune response has not lived up […]