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Anthony Fauci warned us last week that Covid-19 is likely to be hanging over our lives well into 2021. He’s right, of course. We need to accept this reality and take steps to meet it rather than deny his message. Many Americans are resistant to this possibility. They’re hoping to restart postponed sports seasons, attend schools more easily, enjoy rescheduled vacations and participate in delayed parties and gatherings .It is completely understandable that many are tiring of restrictions due to Covid-19. Unfortunately, their resolve is weakening right when we need it to harden. This could cost us dearly. (Aaron E. Carroll, 9/15)

To hear President Trump tell it, we’re on a glide path to an effective vaccine for covid-19. “We’re going to have a vaccine in a matter of weeks,” he said Tuesday on “Fox & Friends.” “It could be four weeks, it could be eight weeks.” Less rosy estimates of vaccine availability share the same basic assumption: At least one of the vaccines currently in clinical trials will prove to be effective and safe. But if that assumption proves faulty (and here’s hoping it doesn’t), all bets are off. There would then simply be no way to estimate when a successful trial might be completed and a vaccine available. (Peter J. Lurie, 9/15)

It would be the cruelest of ironies if Donald Trump’s great bid for redemption after so many coronavirus failures — by rapidly producing a vaccine — also fails because of mismanagement. The president is banking on acquiring what his campaign advisers call the “Holy Grail” by Election Day. It would be a totem of ultimate achievement over a virus that on Trump’s watch has wrecked the economy and killed 195,000 Americans, greater losses than any other nation in the world has suffered. (9/16)

President Trump doesn’t think Americans should put much stock in scientific consensus. He prefers to sprinkle our most intractable and urgent problems with pixie dust and promises that — presto! — they will simply vanish. The latest example of Trump’s magical thinking came Monday, when the president dismissed a suggestion that the dozens of fires raging across the West could be related to human-caused climate change. Although 2020 is on track to be one of the hottest years on record, the president told state and local officials in McClellan Park, Calif., that “it will start getting cooler. You just watch.” (Karen Tumulty, 9/15)

Among the few remaining advantages that Americans can claim over other countries is the relative cleanliness of our air. Air pollution is a leading risk factor for early death; it is linked to an estimated four million premature fatalities around the world annually. But over the last 50 years, since Congress passed environmental legislation in 1970, air quality in the United States has steadily improved. Today, America’s air is significantly cleaner than in much of the rest of the world, including in many of our wealthy, industrialized peers. Well, not literally today, considering I needed an N95 mask to walk to the mailbox this morning. (Farhad Manjoo, 9/16)

Sports are playing to empty stadiums. Theaters are dark. Restaurants are making do with take-out and outdoor dining. And schools are tying themselves in knots over how — and if — they can have in-person instruction. But one person thinks that he is so important that he can flout all of the precautions that governments, businesses and society as a whole have implemented to halt the spread of COVID-19. That person would be none other than President Donald Trump, who kicked off this week with a large indoor rally in Nevada featuring people sitting side-by-side and generally unadorned by masks. (9/15)

For many women who don’t want to have more children, childbirth offers a safe and convenient time for adopting the permanent form of birth control known formally as tubal ligation, and informally as having your tubes tied. For women whose health care is covered by Medicaid, senseless bureaucracy can make this difficult. (Divya Dethier, Megan L. Evans and Erin Tracy Bradley, 9/16)

For me, a reminder that my big gay family matters right now was more than a pleasantry. It was like a message from heaven. For the last four years the message from Donald Trump has been the opposite: To him, we don’t matter at all. In so many ways, he’s made it clear he feels we’d be better off erased. The messaging began the first week of his administration, when mention of L.G.B.T.Q. rights disappeared from the White House website. This was just for starters. Later, he removed us from the 2020 census. He banned trans people from the military. On the anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting, he announced that his administration would roll back Obama-era health care protections for trans people. He prohibited embassies from flying the rainbow flag on flagpoles. For three out of four Junes he has failed to mention Pride Month — although one time he did take time out of his busy schedule to talk up National Homeownership Month. (Jennifer Finney Boylan, 9/16)

The former No. 2 executive at the National Rifle Association has performed a major about-face on gun control, effectively saying in a new book and recent interviews that he disagrees with the conservative group’s most stubborn positions on gun rights. Once having toed the NRA line on unbridled gun freedoms — even as children were mass-murdered in schools — Joshua L. Powell now says he favors gun control and is openly challenging what he terms its greed and high-level corruption. It would have been far more effective for Powell to have spoken such words while he was still at the NRA in order to put the lie to chief executive Wayne LaPierre’s mind-numbing defense of unrestricted gun rights. But better late than never. (9/14)

With only a few weeks until Election Day, voters are feverishly hearing from candidates running for offices from your local town board to president of the United States. Though rallies, town halls and campaigning are mostly virtual this election season, candidates are articulating their visions and appealing to voters' interests. As an electorate, we are being demographically portioned into groups such as the “suburban” voter, the “millennial” voter or the “single-issue” voter. However, one major constituency is not being highlighted in the current debate, which is why, as a pediatrician, I plan to vote like children’s futures depend on it in November. Children are 20% of the population but 0% of the vote, and their problems don’t get addressed unless physicians, parents, teachers and those who care for kids make their issues are own. (Shetal Shah, 9/16)