Kristofer Smith, MD, MPP is the Chief Medical Officer of Landmark Heath, where he oversees efforts to establish a high-quality and clinically effective home-based medical care model for patients with serious illness.
We sat down with Dr. Smith to discuss his experience caring for patients with serious illness and developing programs to provide health care at home, among other topics. The following interview has been edited and condensed. Read More
By Sam Friedman
Amid an emergent international consensus that the COVID pandemic is “over,” writings about the pandemic and its meanings have burst forth like the flowers of June.
This article will focus on one such book, Lessons from the COVID War: An Investigative Report. Produced by an eminently established collection of people, The COVID Crisis Group. The book is intelligently critical of what was done during the pandemic, but at all points it remains within the confines of what is “politically respectable.” This respectability, I argue, means that their recommendations are too narrow to protect Americans, much less the populations of the Global South, from pandemics ahead (barring unexpectedly marvelous advances in vaccine breadth and rapidity of deployment).
By Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant
Over the course of the pandemic it has been popular to claim that we have “learned lessons from COVID,” as though this plague has spurred a revolution in how we treat illness, debility, and death under capitalism.
Management consulting firm McKinsey, for example, writes that COVID has taught us that “infectious diseases are a whole-of-society issue.” A Yale Medicine bulletin tells us that we successfully learned “everyone is not treated equally, especially in a pandemic.” These bromides reflect the Biden administration’s evaluation of its own efforts; a recent White House report professes to have “successfully put equity at the center of a public health response for the first time in the nation’s history.”
We have learned nothing from COVID. The ongoing death, debility, disability, and immiseration of the pandemic are testament only to a failed political economy that pretends at magnanimity.
By Colleen Campbell
While post-viral illnesses are not new, they have been considerably neglected by the public health, medical, and scientific communities. This invisibility has, in many ways, been constructed by institutional neglect and medical sexism.
The COVID-19 pandemic is now causing a reckoning with this institutional neglect. This is because COVID Long Haulers and patient advocates for the chronically ill are forcing an unprecedented recognition for these chronic complex diseases.