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Thousands of experts hired to aid public health are now losing their jobs
As COVID-19 raged, roughly 4,000 highly skilled epidemiologists, communication specialists, and public health nurses were hired by a nonprofit tied to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to plug the holes at battered public health departments on the front lines. But during the past few months, the majority of the CDC Foundation’s contracts for […]
Many states have yet to spend millions of federal money to tackle COVID
The Biden administration in March 2021 announced it was investing $2.25 billion to address COVID health disparities, the largest federal funding initiative designed specifically to help underserved communities hardest hit by the virus. Two months later, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention awarded grants to every state health department and 58 large city and […]
As patients fell ill with COVID inside hospitals, government oversight fell short
One by one, the nurses taking care of actress Judi Evans at Riverside Community Hospital kept calling out sick. Patients were coughing as staffers wheeled the maskless soap opera star around the California hospital while treating her for injuries from a horseback fall in May 2020, Evans said. She remembered they took her to a […]
COVID is killing rural Americans at twice the rate of urbanites
Rural Americans are dying of COVID at more than twice the rate of their urban counterparts — a divide that health experts say is likely to widen as access to medical care shrinks for a population that tends to be older, sicker, heavier, poorer and less vaccinated. While the initial surge of COVID-19 deaths skipped […]
Over half of states have rolled back public health powers in pandemic
Republican legislators in more than half of U.S. states, spurred on by voters angry about lockdowns and mask mandates, are taking away the powers state and local officials use to protect the public against infectious diseases. A KHN review of hundreds of pieces of legislation found that, in all 50 states, legislators have proposed bills […]
Boeing tested air purifiers like those used in schools. It decided not to use them.
Aerospace giant Boeing tested two kinds of ionization technologies — like those widely adopted in schools hoping to combat COVID— to determine how well each killed germs on surfaces and decided that neither was effective enough to install on its commercial planes. Boeing noted in its conclusion that “air ionization has not shown significant disinfection […]
Stark racial disparities exist for vaccination rates across U.S.
Black Americans’ covid-19 vaccination rates are still lagging months into the nation’s campaign, while Hispanics are closing the gap and Native Americans show the highest rates overall, according to federal data obtained by Kaiser Health News. The data, provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in response to a public records request, gives […]
After working for Trump, two top COVID advisors go to work for fan companies
Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has joined Big Ass Fans, lending his scientific credibility to a company division that says its ion-generating technology kills the coronavirus. The company charges $9,450 for a fan with technology that academic air quality experts question. As strategic health and safety adviser, […]