Medical and Scientific Responses: COVID-19
Medical Knowledge and Research
Robert Peckham, "A Health Emergency is No Time to Sideline the Medical Humanities," Times Higher Education (February 10, 2020)
Joelle M. Abi-Rached, "Covid-19 and Big Data: A Footnote," Medium (March 30, 2020)
Lorraine Daston, "Ground-Zero Empiricism," In the Moment (April 10, 2020)
Henry M. Cowles, "The scientific method can't save us from the Coronavirus," The Washington Post (April 23, 2020)
Laetitia Lenel, "Public and Scientific Uncertainty in the Time of COVID-19," History of Knowledge (May 13, 2020)
Banu Subramaniam and Debjani Bhattacharyya, "A Viral Education: Scientific Lessons from India's WhatsApp University," Somatosphere (May 31, 2020)
Jahnavi Phalkey, "The Pandemic: What Should the Public Know?" Nature India (July 21, 2020)
Philippa Levine, "Russia's Fast-Track Vaccine Is a Lesson in Ethics, Human Exploitation," The Hill (August 13, 2020)
Hao Chen, "Nonhuman Animals in a Human Pandemic: Past and Present," Environmental History (October 13, 2020)
Edmund Russell, "Coevolution in a Time of Coronaviruses," Environmental History (October 13, 2020)
Nancy Tomes and Anthony Mason, "Over a Century Ago, Masks Were Controversial during the 1918 Flu Pandemic," CBS This Morning (October 30, 2020)
Torsten Kathke, "Popular Science in Times of Covid," GESIS Blog (January 27, 2021)
Warwick Anderson, "The Model Crisis, or How to Have Critical Promiscuity in the Time of Covid-19," Social Studies of Science (February 16, 2021)
The Politics of Infection Control
Robert Peckham, "Coronavirus Is Testing the Limits of China's - and Hong Kong's - Preparedness," South China Morning Post (February 6, 2020)
Deborah Levine, "No, Mr. President, healthcare workers aren't stealing masks. You failed them." The Washington Post (March 30, 2020)
Emma Day, "The Coronavirus is a Flimsy Excuse to Ban Abortion," The Washington Post (April 8, 2020)
Sarah Yu, "A brief social history of the face mask, and a historian's reflections about the present," Coronavirus Chronicles (April 21, 2020)
Warwick Anderson, "Unmasked: Face-work in a Pandemic," Arena (May 29, 2020)
Jennifer Burek Pierce, "From Alfred Fournier to Anthony Fauci: Targeting Public Health Messages to Teens," Nursing Clio (June 17, 2020)
Matthew Newsom Kerr, "Licenses to Ill: Heal Passes and Surveillance," Origins (September 28, 2020)
Nursing
Cynthia Connolly, Patricia D'Antonio, and Julie Fairman, "Coronavirus nursing shortage? Three ways to get more nurses—now," The Philadelphia Inquirer (March 27, 2020)
Vaccine Development and Distribution
E. Thomas Ewing, "History Reminds Us that Vaccines Alone Don't End Pandemics," The Washington Post (November 30, 2020)
Susan Brynne Long, "Our Leaders Getting Vaccinated Can Build Confidence in a Covid-19 Vaccine," The Washington Post (December 7, 2020)
Michael Falcone, "If Nations Compete for Doses of Coronavirus Vaccines, We'll All Lose," The Washington Post (December 9, 2020)
Dan Royles, "Years of Medical Abuse Make Black Americans Less Likely to Trust the Coronavirus Vaccine," The Washington Post (December 15, 2020)
Cora Olson and Claire Simpson, "The Essential Problem: Essential Workers Category and Vaccine Roll-Outs," Nursing Clio (January 26, 2021)
Cameron Givens, "The Key to Combating Conspiracy Theories about Coronavirus Vaccines," The Washington Post (February 1, 2021)
Joyce Chaplin, "Having Vaccines Alone Isn't Enough to Defeat Covid-19," The Washington Post (February 23, 2021)
Evan P. Sullivan, "Misinformation, Vaccination, and 'Medical Liberty' in the Age of COVID-19," Nursing Clio (March 30, 2021)
Explore the Bibliography Using Zotero
The AHA’s Bibliography of Historians’ Responses to COVID-19 Zotero Library allows users to sort and filter entries using more than 145 topics.
AHA on COVID-19
In the wake of COVID-19’s disruption to daily life in the United States, the American Historical Association responded to the pandemic’s impact by advocating for historians, emphasizing the importance of historical thinking in understanding the current crisis, and urging all institutions that employ historians to be flexible and humane in considering the needs of their employees and constituencies. This section includes AHA statements on the impact of COVID-19 on historians, as well as Perspectives on History articles on topics contextualizing the pandemic.