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The Covid-19 vaccines authorized for use today were developed at unprecedented speed and surpassed expectations in how well they worked. The billions of people who are protected by them have avoided severe symptoms, hospitalization and deaths. These vaccines are a scientific success beyond measure. And yet they could be even better. (Akiko Iwasaki, 5/16)

A new analysis in a prestigious journal offers timely reassurance about the COVID-19 shots' safety and effectiveness to a vitally important but vaccine-hesitant group: expectant mothers. Making safety judgments for two is a daunting responsibility during pregnancy. Mothers-to-be are cautious about medications, food, alcohol and cigarettes and anything else that could harm fetal development during this crucial window of time. During the COVID pandemic, that concern has understandably included questions about vaccination against this new viral threat. (5/15)

After more than two years, the United States has now passed the tragic milestone of a million Covid-19-related deaths -- and the pandemic is not remotely done. To learn more about where we are in the deadliest pandemic in American history, I spoke with Michael Osterholm, who has publicly warned of the dangers of a global pandemic for more than a decade and half and was a member of Joe Biden's Covid task force during the presidential transition. Osterholm said Covid-19 keeps firing "210-mph curveballs" at us and anyone who tries to predict what will happen in the coming months is using a crystal ball caked with 5 inches of hardened mud. Osterholm is also the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and author of The New York Times bestseller "Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs." (Peter Bergen, 5/13)

Here we go again. The United States and many other nations appear to be starting another covid wave due to an omicron subvariant that is more transmissible than the last. But this time looks different. Cases are going up, but so far without the accompanying serious disease and death that characterized earlier waves. That should not lead to complacency. (5/14)

Even though Anthony Fauci, the White House’s chief medical adviser, backed off his statement that the United States is “out of the pandemic phase,” elected officials and much of the public seem to think that he had it right the first time. But if the end of the COVID-19 emergency is at hand, the United States is reaching it with lower vaccination and higher per-capita death rates than other wealthy nations. The conventional wisdom is that the American political system failed at public health—by prioritizing individual rights over collective safety; sowing doubt about the benefits of vaccines, masks, and other protective measures; and, most important, failing to implement universal health care, paid sick leave, and other safety-net programs. (Jay Varma, 5/15)

With turnover and vacancy rates barely below record highs, hospital and health care leaders face a workforce reckoning. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that each year over the next decade there will be nearly 400,000 vacancies for registered nurses and nursing assistants – and there are a host of other shortages among physicians, social workers and the like. (J. Stephen Jones, MD, 5/13)

RaDonda Vaught, a former nurse in Tennessee, was sentenced on Friday to three years of supervised probation after being convicted in March of making a fatal medication error in 2017, which resulted in the death of a patient under her care. Although Vaught isn’t being sent to prison, her conviction and sentencing, meted out for the kind of error that routinely occurs in health care institutions across the U.S., are a true travesty of justice. That’s a far cry from what happened to William Husel, a former Ohio physician, who was acquitted of murder in April for hastening the deaths of 14 critically ill patients under his care by ordering doses of the painkiller fentanyl that were 10 times the amount ordinarily ordered for critically ill patients. (Michelle Collins and Cherie Burke, 5/13)