Public Health

PIK Professor Ezekiel Emanuel said that instead of wasting time trying to overturn COVID-19 vaccine mandates, business leaders should focus on protecting their employees from the virus. “That’s the only way we’ll be able to return to normal and stabilize our economy,” he said. Emanuel organized a statement on the matter signed by more than 60 health care organizations.

PIK Professor Dolores Albarracín, Jess Fishman, and Andy Tan, all of the Leonard Davis Institute, wrote an op-ed about the efficacy of vaccine mandates. “Regulations can promote behaviors that benefit society and, in so doing, also may instill social norms to do the right thing,” they wrote.

Marilyn Howarth of the Perelman School of Medicine weighed in on the potential health impacts of a recent junkyard fire in Philadelphia. “I think there’s no question that anyone in the immediate environment of the fire certainly would have been exposed to high levels of particulates and perhaps higher than ideal levels of other chemicals,” she said. “As the smoke drifted away, it does tend to disperse, and the levels are lower.”

Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center said herd immunity, which assumes uniform behavior among individuals, is more complicated than people think it is. “Humans are not a herd,” she said.

Kristen Ghodsee and Mitchell Orenstein of the School of Arts & Sciences wrote about vaccine skepticism in Eastern Europe, which they attribute to the social consequences of communism’s collapse, rather than to the legacy of communism itself.