Public Health

Last week, as covid vaccine appointment slots were snapped up within an hour at CVS stores in 20 states, slots remained open all day at CVS pharmacies in Alabama, South Carolina and Louisiana. The dozens of open appointment slots in the three Southern states stood in sharp contrast to the availability in states such as […]

Ana’s 9-year-old son was the first in the family to come down with symptoms that looked like covid-19 last March. Soon after, the 37-year-old unauthorized immigrant and three of her other children, including a daughter with asthma, struggled to breathe. For the next three weeks, the family fought the illness in isolation — Ana clutching […]

Griffin Dalrymple is an energetic 7-year-old who loves going to school in Eureka, Montana. But two years ago, the boy described by his mother, Jayci, as a “ball of fire” was suddenly knocked back by severe bacterial pneumonia that hospitalized him for two weeks. As her son lay in the intensive care unit with a […]

As cold weather descended upon Washington, D.C., last fall, I deleted my dating apps. I had tried a few video-chat dates when the pandemic was new last spring. They were fun and novel at the time, and felt like a “quarantine experience.” By summer, I went on several physically distant dates in the park. But […]

“When I came into office, the prior administration had contracted for not nearly enough vaccine to cover adults in America. We rectified that.” — President Joe Biden, March 2 news conference During a March 2 news conference on the covid-19 pandemic, President Joe Biden claimed that former President Donald Trump’s administration did not ensure there […]

California rolled out a statewide covid vaccination website this week aiming to streamline the appointment process after months of criticism, but the site is riddled with its own snags, preventing many from signing up for shots. The vaccine sign-up website, My Turn, is the state’s answer to a previous hodgepodge of vaccination appointment systems that […]

Tim Dupin thought — or at least hoped — that Missouri firefighters, paramedics and other emergency medical services personnel would be among the first to get vaccinated against the coronavirus. After months of feeling overlooked by elected leaders in the distribution of safety equipment and other resources, surely, Dupin thought, their role on the front […]

[UPDATED on March 6] Brandon Dell’Orto listened to the comments and complaints as the school board meeting dragged on hour after hour. Many parents were angry. Their kids were sad, bored, borderline depressed, fed up with a school model that didn’t allow them to be on campus every day. The parents wanted schools open. They […]

Can’t see the audio player? Click here to listen on PRX. There’s good news and bad news on covid-19 this week. On the one hand, several million doses of the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine authorized by the FDA for emergency use are already going into the arms of people around the nation. And the Biden […]

As managed-care giant Kaiser Permanente assumes a prominent role in California’s new covid-19 vaccination strategy, it is drawing mixed reviews from members across the country for the way it has run its own vaccine program over the past two months. Conversations with 10 Kaiser enrollees in five states — Colorado, Washington, Virginia, Maryland and California […]