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The same week that Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gave the green light to booster shots for Pfizer vaccine recipients over age 65, the World Health Organization reported that only 2.2% of people in the world’s low-income countries had received even one dose of a Covid vaccine. That means millions of Americans will receive a third vaccine dose while billions around the world have not had their first. That stark contrast of U.S. haves and global have-nots prompted one of my clinic patients to ask me, “Is it immoral for me to get a booster?” (Tim Lahey, 10/15)

In an age of masking, compulsive hand sanitizing and plexiglass dividers, it seems inconceivable that for more than 40 years people enthusiastically signed up — and were often put on a waiting list — to have respiratory viruses, including coronaviruses, dripped into their noses. They were volunteers at the Common Cold Unit, set up in 1946 by the British government’s Medical Research Council. Housed in an abandoned American military field hospital in the English countryside, the Common Cold Unit’s mission was to find a cure for the common cold and by doing so, boost productivity as the battered nation tried to rebuild after World War II. (Kate Murphy, 10/14)

Molly didn’t feel particularly patriotic as she said goodbye to her husband, a Navy doctor, early one morning in September. He was leaving on his second deployment in nine months, with just four days’ notice (he’d gotten only 36 hours’ notice ahead of his previous operation). And although his initial mission had been to the Middle East—on an aircraft carrier as a critical-care physician in case of a COVID-19 outbreak on board—this time he was deploying within the continental United States to support a hospital that was overwhelmed with unvaccinated COVID patients. (Julie Bogen, 10/14)

In March 2020, when Chicago closed down along with the rest of the world, our schools did what they always do when presented with a huge challenge — they faced it with heart and grit. Teachers and principals hand-delivered laptops to homes, set up food banks in their schools and taught themselves how to run virtual education with no prior training or infrastructure, all while caring for their families and monitoring the remote learning of their own children. During this time, we understood how much more teachers do for our kids than just teach. We reflected on how they provide safe and welcoming spaces, how they feed the hungry, how they allow the rest of us to go about our day. (Nate Pietrini, 10/14)

The failure of the United States to vaccinate more people stands out, especially since we had every seeming advantage to get it done. As early as the end of April of this year, when vaccines were in dire short supply globally, almost every adult who wanted to get vaccinated against Covid-19 in the United States could do so, for free. By June, about 43 percent of the U.S. population had received two doses while that number was only about 6 percent in Canada and 3 percent in Japan. Now, just a few months later, these countries, along with 44 others, have surpassed U.S. vaccination rates. And our failure shows: America continues to have among the highest deaths per capita from Covid. (Zeynep Tufekci, 10/15)