Coronavirus

Harald Schmidt of the Perelman School of Medicine spoke about businesses that require proof of vaccination from customers. “There is a risk that vaccine passports turn into antagonism, when really what we need is a partnership approach,” he said.

Jeffrey Morris of the Perelman School of Medicine said there’s been little progress in treating COVID-19 in recent months.

Damon Centola of the Annenberg School for Communication wrote an opinion piece about the best strategies for promoting COVID-19 vaccination. “It takes time to digest an idea with substance to it; it takes repeatedly seeing an idea successfully adopted by others for it to be accepted, take hold and become a norm, and that kind of messaging is most effective when an idea works its way from the outside in,” he said.

Harald Schmidt of the Perelman School of Medicine reflected on the use of incentives to motivate people to get vaccinated for COVID-19. “If we just get needles into arms we haven’t really made any progress on the bigger picture, which is that whole communities are lacking trust in health care systems or the government,” he said.

Drew Weissman of the Perelman School of Medicine said the COVID-19 vaccines are “still working great,” but highly contagious variants and low vaccination rates are eroding progress. “You can’t control a pandemic when 30 percent or even half the people are immunized,” he said.

Paul Offit of the Perelman School of Medicine and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia said that initially, COVID-19 “was billed falsely as a winter respiratory virus that, like influenza, could cause severe and occasionally fatal pneumonia. But this virus is much more than that.”

Susan Coffin and Sage Myers of the Perelman School of Medicine and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia wrote an opinion piece about unvaccinated children’s vulnerability to the COVID-19 delta variant. They called for adults to continue wearing masks in risky environments, saying, “allowing even one child to become severely ill is too many if it can be prevented with simple measures.”

PIK Professor Ezekiel Emanuel said workplace vaccine mandates could improve uptake. When Penn’s health system required staff to get COVID-19 vaccines, Emanuel said, “the sky didn’t fall. When we do it, and we have a good justification, people respond.”

PIK Professor Ezekiel Emanuel spoke about vaccine mandates for health care workers. “Patients come first. It's our obligation to promote their health and well-being,” he said.