Invited commentary: The Covid-19 pandemic in the United States

Abstract

Despite being the wealthiest and one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, the United States has the greatest number of Covid-19 cases and deaths. What accounts for this failure? The dismantling of the country’s public health infrastructure has crippled contact tracing and exacerbated inequality as a disproportionate number of poor people and people of color have fallen ill with Covid-19. Inadequate regulation of the private for-profit sector has adversely affected the efficiency and quality of testing for the virus, and the prescription of costly drugs whose benefit and safety in treating infected patients have not been established. More stringent regulation of the commercial sector has led to the development of efficacious vaccines in a remarkably short time. Still, questions remain about the vaccines’ effectiveness in the real world, and their safety.