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As if parents don’t have enough to worry about — a global pandemic, a baby formula shortage — there is a new mysterious ailment afflicting young children in the form of severe hepatitis. Here’s the bottom line: This is not reason for panic, but it does deserve vigilance. Parents should also be wary of speculation about the illness. There is still much we don’t know. (Leana S. Wen, 5/17)

On Wednesday, responding to the baby formula shortage crisis, President Biden said he is invoking the Defense Production Act “to ensure that manufacturers have the necessary ingredients to make safe, healthy infant formula here at home.” He also announced something called Operation Fly Formula “to speed up the import of infant formula and start getting more formula in stores as soon as possible. ”It’s about time. If you’re a parent struggling to feed an infant, the shortage is, indeed, a crisis. Two children in Tennessee were hospitalized recently because they couldn’t get the specialized formula they needed for their medical condition. (Jessica Grose, 5/18)

The baby was just two weeks old, and hungry. Elizabeth Hanson tried to breastfeed, but didn’t have enough milk. With terror, she watched as her daughter lost weight, tiny bones protruding from her skin. In America, in modern times, most parents can count on multiple safe, healthy options for feeding an infant: breast milk or formula. That is, unless they are experiencing the impacts of the current formula shortage, as thousands of families across the United States are. (Carla Cevasco, 5/18)

My son began drinking formula in earnest when he was 7 weeks old, after I was taken to the emergency room in an ambulance because I had postpartum pre-eclampsia and a blind spot had erupted in my vision, a potential stroke symptom. The whole experience was terrifying, but as I sat in the emergency room having not eaten in 12 hours, my breasts leaking all over the hospital dressing gown, my biggest concern was not that my brain might be malfunctioning but that my baby might be going hungry because I wasn’t at home to feed him. As the doctor informed me that I appeared to have a brain aneurysm, it barely registered; all I could think of was how I was going to get breast milk to my son if I had to stay in the hospital overnight. (Mercifully, the doctor was wrong about the brain aneurysm, but I learned that six weeks later.) (Elizabeth Spiers, 5/18)

During the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, media outlets, health experts and scholars have explained the COVID-19 vaccine divide in the U.S. as partisan, educational, racial or socioeconomic. As it stands, the overall U.S. adult vaccination rate has hovered around 65 percent for months now. But this division may go back to the founding ideals of democracy in the U.S.: Americans simply aren’t accustomed to expecting much from their government. (Adriana de Souza e Silva, Claudio Araujo, 5/18)

In March 2020, just weeks after the pandemic had been declared and the world cast into crisis, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, went on CNN to prepare Americans for what he thought was the worst-case scenario. With about just 125,000 confirmed cases in the country at that point, he warned that Covid-19 could eventually kill between 100,000 and 200,000 Americans, far exceeding the flu’s annual death toll even in its most severe years. (Spencer Bokat-Lindell, 5/18)