Category: Infectious disease

The fifth child: Succeeding with the COVID vaccination program

How do people respond to a gift, especially if it is lifesaving? Pretty much as they would many millennia ago. Over the past five months, while helping inoculate about 100,000 people at one of Tucson, Arizona’s COVID vaccination centers, I was constant…

The COVID-19 pandemic vowels: adaptability, empathy, innovation, optimism, unity

It feels like the days when I could go to all-you-can-eat buffets, when I could actually catch a smile from a patient and when I could hug someone after a successful chemotherapy round were written in history books long ago. In some ways, I have spent …

Not gone, but nearly forgotten: HIV in youths during COVID

When I was in college three decades ago, someone close to me was diagnosed with HIV. He was in his early 20s. The only drug available was the controversial AZT, an expensive drug originally designed to treat cancer. I thought my friend would die. Since…

The disparity no one talks about: COVID vaccines and men

As an epidemiologist and former public health official, I’ve noticed a lot of coverage in the news about  COVID vaccine hesitancy issues in BIPOC communities, and I, like many other clinicians, am working hard to address those issues.  But there is one…

Mother’s Day during the COVID-19 pandemic

Kisses, hugs, cuddles, breakfast in bed/beautiful brunch outdoors is how I remember celebrating Mother’s Day with my kids in the past, but 2020 was a bit different. As a physician caring for children with COVID-19, along with being a mother of 2 young …

Responding to the COVID pandemic: a lesson in coalescence [PODCAST]

“When faced with an existential crisis, any organization, as large as a nation or as small as a marriage, will go one of two ways. Either it will bond together, coalesced in a common purpose, or it will collapse in a spasm of blame and shame. Whi…

The tragic dance of the vaccine rollout

You would think that the vaccine rollout wouldn’t be so difficult. We had some brilliant scientists who raced against time and developed novel vaccines with technology never used before. Both Pfizer and Moderna used unique mRNA technology. The va…

The next impending health crisis for families

For over a year, I have watched and witnessed the multitude of ways that COVID has ignited crisis after crisis in our country and across the world. At first, the crisis of the unknown and the ill-prepared – we as health care professionals did not know …

A plea for help from the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic

I am a palliative care physician in a hospital in our nation’s capital region.  Like most urban hospitals, ours has been hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.  My colleagues and I are exhausted and emotionally devastated.  We are not alone.  …

Using nano “couriers” to deliver PKD drugs to just the right address

The term “mRNA lipid nanoparticle” has become common of late, given the use of Pfizer/BioNTech’s and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines make of nanoparticles to carry mRNA into cells. Once inside a cell, the mRNA instructs the cell to make pieces of the prote…