Drawing a Path From Vaccine Hesitancy to Vaccine Confidence. The Barbershop Storybook Project, a six-book graphic novel series created by Jasmine Mitchell ’20 and Marcus Ford ’20, is the latest initiative from the Maryland Center for Health Equity's Health Advocates In-Reach and Research (HAIR) campaign. The comics aim to address COVID-19 misinformation and open dialogues about mental health, grief, vaccines, masking and more, starting in barbershops and salons. (Maryland Today, 9/24/22)

See also: VIDEO: Barbershop & Salon Wellness Warriors: HAIR Network Takes on Flu Vaccinations and COVID-19 Boosters (HAIR Network, 10/22)

A wave of anti-vaccine legislation is sweeping the United States. Across the country, Republican lawmakers have drafted a pile of anti-vaccine mandate bills this year, chipping away at a foundational health practice for the last half-century. More than 80 anti-vaccine bills have been introduced in state legislatures, according to academics tracking the phenomenon, dwarfing the number of countervailing pro-vaccine bills. (Vox, 10/6/22)

See also: False claim that CDC would require covid vaccines for kids goes viral (Washington Post, 10/19/22)

A Fall COVID-19 Booster Campaign Could Save Thousands of Lives, Billions of Dollars. If vaccination continued at its current pace through the end of March 2023, a potential winter surge in COVID-19 infections could result in a peak of around 16,000 hospitalizations and 1,200 deaths per day by March 2023. Under both scenarios modeled, we found an aggressive fall booster vaccination campaign could prevent COVID-19 deaths from exceeding 400 per day. (Commonwealth Fund, 10/5/22)

Peripartum Outcomes Associated With COVID-19 Vaccination During Pregnancy: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. In this systematic review and meta-analysis, COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy was not associated with increased risks of peripartum adverse outcomes, including preterm birth, small size for gestational age, low Apgar score at 5 minutes, cesarean delivery, postpartum hemorrhage, and chorioamnionitis. Furthermore, COVID-19 vaccination during pregnancy was associated with lower risks of neonatal intensive care unit admission, intrauterine fetal death, and maternal SARS-CoV-2 infection. (JAMA, 10/3/22)

See also: Pandemic Led to Surgical Delays in Gynecologic Cancers, and Worse Outcomes (MedPage Today, 10/4/22)

Biden’s Operation Warp Speed revival stumbles out of the gate. The initiative was envisioned as a revival of Operation Warp Speed, the Trump-era program that paired federal dollars with private sector know-how to deliver the first vaccines in record time. By replicating the formula with a range of new candidates, officials planned to churn out increasingly advanced vaccines and treatments just as fast — and ahead of other nations. (POLITICO, 10/5/22)

See also: Biden’s Plan for Next Pandemic Eyes Vaccine Supply Within 130 Days (Bloomberg, 10/18/22)

A Study Finally Shows Just How Much Deadlier COVID Has Been for Republicans. Recently, a new working paper by three Yale public health and economics researchers—Jacob Wallace, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, and Jason Schwartz—is offering the most definitive and direct evidence I’ve seen yet confirming that Republicans have indeed been more likely to die because of COVID. (Slate, 10/7/22)

Developing a Public Health Tool to Predict the Virality of Vaccine Misinformation Narratives Department of Health and Human Services. The purpose of this Notice of Funding Opportunity is to support research to develop a predictive forecasting model that identifies new or reemerging misinformation narratives that are likely to disseminate widely and have a high potential for impact on vaccine confidence. The information from this model will then be used to develop a tool that public health agencies could use to predict misinformation trends in the populations served. Finally, the researchers will evaluate the tool's predictive capabilities on both future social media misinformation narratives and real-world events. (Grants.gov, 10/20/22)

Covid-19 is an inverse equity story, not a racial equity success story. s MacArthur Foundation fellow Jennifer Richeson noted in The Atlantic in 2020, Americans love to perpetuate narratives of racial progress, regardless of whether that narrative is aligned with reality. We saw this in a recent New York Times essay that claimed the change in Covid-19 death rates is a laudable example of the U.S. overcoming racial injustice. Pointing to improvements in vaccination rates in Black and Hispanic communities, Times senior writer David Leonhardt wrote that the racial gap in death rates has also disappeared. “In a country with deep racial inequities, where Covid was initially another tragic example,” he went on to say, “the virus is no longer disproportionately harming Black and Hispanic Americans.” And once again we are implored to use the story of redemption to whitewash the story of racial injustice.. (STAT News, 10/25/22)

Messaging — the unrecognized coefficient in pandemic control — matters. President Biden’s assertion that Americans need to learn to live with Covid-19 seems to follow the logic that government authorities and some physicians articulated in the wake of diphtheria: that if society can’t fix a problem, there’s no point talking about it. But that logic is as wrong now as it was then. Biden and others need to understand that messaging matters. If people don’t keep talking about a problem, then as a society we’ll never fix it. (STAT News, 10/4/22)

Women are returning to (paid) work after the pandemic forced many to leave their jobs. In those months when women dropped out of the workforce in large numbers, economists, businesses and policymakers began to fear they'd never return, creating a worker shortage that could hobble the economic recovery. But nearly two-and-a-half years after the coronavirus first struck, the number of working-age women in the job market has finally returned to pre-pandemic levels. (NPR, 9/28/22)

When Will the Pandemic Truly Be ‘Over’? It’s a question that can be countered with layers of answers. Official pronouncements for instance: The World Health Organization says “We are not there yet, but the end is in sight,” while the Department of Health and Human Services notes that the US remains in a public health emergency that could be redeclared next month. Or metrics, for example: According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are all declining—but at the same time, Covid has been ranked the third-leading cause of death in the US. (Wired, 9/28/22)

Delayed Medical Care And Unmet Care Needs Due To The COVID-19 Pandemic Among Adults With Disabilities In The US. Improving data collection on disabled Americans according to disability status and type of disability, designating people with disabilities as a Special Medically Underserved Population under the Public Health Services Act, and incorporating standardized disability data in electronic health record systems would inform policies, programs, and interventions to achieve equitable access to high-quality medical care services that meet the needs of all people with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. (Health Affairs, 10/22)

See also: Long COVID Appears to Have Led to a Surge of the Disabled in the Workplace (Federal Reserve Bank of New York, 10/20/22)

The CDC Scientist Who Couldn’t Get Monkeypox Treatment. As a Black man and a senior CDC scientist, William L. Jeffries IV knows a lot about health inequities and infectious diseases in America. Still, it took visits to 3 doctors — and a desperate call to a colleague — for him to get treatment for monkeypox. (ProPublica, 10/5/22)

Preparing for Pandemics and Other Health Threats. To prevent avoidable illness and death from the next pandemic, and to improve health and productivity regardless of when the next deadly variant or microbe emerges, societies need progress in 3 areas: a renaissance in public health; robust primary health care at the center of health care systems; and resilience so people are healthier and communities trust health care and other public services and are thus better able to withstand and effectively respond to health threats. (JAMA, 10/7/22)

See also: Why addressing inequality must be central to pandemic preparedness (BMJ Global Health, 9/6/22)

Maternity care ‘deserts’ on the rise across the U.S., report finds. Black women, in particular, are three times more likely to die as a result of pregnancy than white women. In light of other stressors on the health care system including the pandemic, staff shortages, and increased abortion restrictions across the country, experts worry that access to comprehensive reproductive care will continue to decrease, putting pregnant people and their babies even more at risk. (STAT News, 10/11/22)

See also: Antenatal Care During the COVID-19 Pandemic (Surgo Ventures, 10/6/22)