Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (Emeritus), Baltimore, MD, USA.
Int J Equity Health. 2021 Jan 4;20(1):3. doi: 10.1186/s12939-020-01354-6.
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.
尽管美国是世界上最富裕和技术最先进的国家之一，但它却拥有最多的新冠病毒病例和死亡人数。造成这种失败的原因是什么？美国公共卫生基础设施的瓦解削弱了接触者追踪的能力，并加剧了不平等，因为大量贫困人口和有色人种感染了新冠病毒。对私营盈利部门的监管不足，对病毒检测的效率和质量产生了不利影响，也导致了昂贵药物的处方泛滥，而这些药物在治疗感染患者方面的疗效和安全性尚未得到证实。对商业部门更严格的监管使得在极短的时间内研发出了有效的疫苗。尽管如此，人们对疫苗在现实世界中的有效性及其安全性仍存在疑问。
