Dr. Ashish K. Jha is dean of Brown University School of Public Health and a contributing Globe Opinion writer.

It’s easy to feel like the United States is losing ground in public health. Policies and actions from federal health leaders have fractured trust, undermined science, and disrupted essential services. This past year brought funding cuts to core health programs, the spread of dubious science, and the use of food benefits and health care as bargaining chips in political negotiations. The country urgently needs a course correction before the story of public health in America becomes one of steady decline.

The four governments of the United Kingdom responded during the COVID-19 pandemic. But they did “too little, too late,” to effectively stop the virus from spreading during a critical moment in time, according to a national inquiry published this week.

“This lack of urgency and the huge rise in infections made a mandatory lockdown inevitable,” the inquiry report explained. “It should have been introduced one week earlier. Modelling shows that in England alone there would have been approximately 23,000 fewer deaths in the first wave up until 1 July 2020.”

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The best books of 2025

Fair Doses: An Insider’s Story of the Pandemic and the Global Fight for Vaccine Equity. By Seth Berkley. University of California Press; 408 pages; $29.95 and £25

The story of vaccines, as told by an infectious disease epidemiologist. During the covid-19 pandemic, Seth Berkley fought against political resistance and nationalism to help distribute 2bn vaccines across the world.

(TNND) — Most Americans are confident that childhood vaccines are safe and effective.

But new polling shows many Americans are skeptical of the shots. And there are gaps in sentiment along demographic and political lines.

A Pew Research Center survey conducted last month and published Tuesday found 63% of Americans have high confidence in the effectiveness of childhood vaccines.

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Last week, the two top officials at the National Institutes of Health—the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research—debuted a new plan to help Americans weather the next pandemic: getting everyone to eat better and exercise.

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Environmentalism has typically focused on outdoor air quality, but climate change is pushing more people indoors more of the time, even as airborne pathogens and wildfire smoke challenge indoor air quality. I discuss the fight for better indoor air with Dr. Georgia Lagoudas, who recently coordinated a global pledge declaring it a basic human right. We dig into what pollutes indoor air, the technologies that can keep it clean, and the enormous social and economic benefits clean air in schools.

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Meet the heroes keeping global progress alive

On a Friday morning in October, about 100 high school and college students gathered in a Utah ballroom to play a game. Some students were assigned specific roles and given costumes to wear. “Government officials” slung ties over their T-shirts; “store clerks” sported aprons; and a trio of “journalists” wore fedoras and carried fake microphones.

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The United States may be heading into its second severe flu season in a row, driven by a mutated strain called subclade K that’s behind early surges in the United Kingdom, Canada and Japan.

Last winter’s season was extreme, too. The US had its highest rates of flu hospitalizations in nearly 15 years. At least 280 children died of influenza, the highest number since pediatric death numbers were required to be shared in 2004.

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A physician–scientist involved in the equitable-access initiative examines its achievements and discusses what can be done better when the world faces the next pandemic.

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A resident of Washington state has contracted a new form of bird flu — the first case of its kind.

The source of infection remains unknown, setting this case apart from most other infections linked to farmworkers or diseased animals.

Virologists warn each human infection gives the virus a chance to mutate, potentially becoming more transmissible between people.

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