The Latest Research, Commentary, And News From Health Affairs
Thursday, December 30, 2021
Dear John,
The year 2021 was a big year for Health Affairs Forefront, formerly Health Affairs Blog. October marked the blog’s 15th anniversary.
This December, Health Affairs Blog became Health Affairs Forefront, making the high-quality content readers have come to expect from Health Affairs Blog even more accessible.
Health Affairs Forefront: The 2021 Most-Read List
Not surprisingly, many of our most-read pieces for 2021 concerned COVID-19. Below is the top-ten list for the year. We encourage you to read, or re-read, these pieces, and to check out Health Affairs Forefront for health policy discussion and analysis each day. E. Thomas Ewing, "Measuring Mortality In The Pandemics Of
1918–19 And 2020–21" (April 1)
Learning the lessons history offers is essential for creating effective policies. Tom Ewing explained that the 1918-19 influenza pandemic has much to teach us about dealing with COVID-19—if we are careful to draw accurate lessons from that earlier catastrophe.
COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective, but some recipients have experienced short-term symptoms such as fever and soreness. As the US began to roll out COVID-19 vaccines, Reiss and Caplan called on employers and policy makers to give workers time off to recover from these side effects.
Israel’s response to COVID-19 offers lessons for the US and other countries, Rosen and coauthors wrote. However, they noted that those lessons should be drawn with caution, with due consideration of the differences between nations.
Appel and coauthors called for normalizing fentanyl test strips, small strips of paper that can detect the presence of fentanyl in a drug batch. They asked: "If society has begun to accept naloxone’s utility for preventing drug overdose and death, why aren’t we implementing a tool to prevent the overdose from happening in the first place?"
One of the constants of Health Affairs Forefront has been the comprehensive reportingin "Following The ACA," featuring rapid-response pieces — first by Tim Jost, now by Katie Keith. In this piece Keith reported on the coverage provisions of the American Rescue Plan, the pandemic relief legislation passed by Congress in
March.
Sitlani and coauthors identified obstacles such as global biomanufacturing bottlenecks that stood in the way of realizing the full potential of monoclonal antibodies to slow the progression of COVID-19. The authors offered solutions such as
"innovative licensing partnerships and collaborations among biomanufacturers and between manufacturers and public entities."
One of the major health policy debates of 2021 has been over the various forms of COVID-19 vaccine mandates. In February, Parasidis and Kesselheim addressed this topic with regard to vaccines authorized by an Emergency Use Authorization from the Food and Drug Administration. They concluded that mandates for such vaccines would likely not pass legal muster and satisfied neither ethical nor public policy criteria.
In her annual projection of health care trends for the coming year, DeVore discussed a broad range of topics including supply chain issues, coverage reform, public health infrastructure, maternal health, and, of course, the pandemic. "COVID-19 has shone a bright light on systemic issues that have stymied progress in health care," she wrote.
In her second rapid-response article to make the top ten, Keith reported on the state of implementation of the new subsidies available through the American Rescue Plan and how consumers would be affected.
One of the all-too-few pieces of good news about COVID-19 was the rapid development of multiple vaccines against the virus. How did that take place? "The success of the US COVID-19 vaccine effort didn’t happen on its own; it was enabled by decades of long-term investments by the federal government, followed by additional federal investment in the development of the COVID-19 vaccines themselves,"
wrote Frank and coauthors.
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Project HOPE is a global health and humanitarian relief organization that places power in the hands of local health care workers to save lives across the globe. Project HOPE has published Health Affairs since 1981.
