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Scott Atlas is the newest member of the White House senior staff. Appointed barely a month ago, he’s undergoing a public hazing. His brief as a special adviser to President Trump, he tells me in an interview by Zoom, is to “advise the president on integrating the science and developing a policy for how we deal with the coronavirus pandemic.” Still living out of “multiple suitcases” in a Washington hotel, he was paid a mighty Beltway compliment this week when two national newspapers ran hit pieces on him. (Tunku Varadarajan, 9/4)

In January, when covid-19 seemed like a distant threat, I had a patient with the flu. The infection hit her hard; she had to be put on a ventilator and was given intravenous steroids. I took care of her during her long hospital stay after she was released from intensive care. Each day, the resident physicians and I would ask her: “Any thought about getting the vaccines we discussed?”Every day, the answer was the same: No. We told her that we got the flu shot every year, that her recent illness would have been prevented by the vaccine, that her asthma and other medical problems put her at risk for serious complications from another bout of influenza. It didn’t matter. “I don’t trust shots,” she told us. (Erin N. Marcus, 9/4)

Sen. Kamala Harris suggested Saturday that she might refuse a vaccination for Covid-19 because “I would not trust Donald Trump.” My father, 96, feels the same way about Gerald Ford. “No way,” he says when I tell him I hope he gets the new shot as soon as it’s available. “I got the swine flu vaccine in 1976. I was in bed for three days, and my memory hasn’t been the same since.” That fiasco has fueled many anti-vaxxers since. More than 40 million people received a rushed, flawed vaccine against a virus that never emerged, and at least 500 cases of the paralyzing Guillain-Barré syndrome were linked to it, along with thousands of cases of other unreported symptoms like my father’s. (Marc Siegel, 9/7)

Jose Velasquez, a 79-year-old father from Bexar County, Texas, tested positive for the coronavirus on March 26 and died on April 17. During those weeks, the staff at the nursing home where he lived assured his family that he showed no symptoms of Covid-19 and, according to a lawsuit filed by his children, failed to ensure that he received proper medical care. The staff did not transfer him to a hospital as he deteriorated or even warn his family that he was sick, according to the suit. Mr. Velasquez’s family says that just hours before he died, the staff at the home reported he was “doing fine.”The facility had a bad safety record, according to the lawsuit, was chronically understaffed, had received citations for failing to carry out basic infection-control programs and, in the months after the coronavirus erupted, its operators did not heed state guidelines for keeping the virus in check. (9/5)

All of the fears I nurtured in 2016 about Donald Trump’s unfitness for the presidency, and the dangers of putting him in the White House for the sake of judicial appointments or tax cuts or any other policy goal, have seemingly been vindicated so far in 2020. Combine Trump’s conduct throughout the Covid-19 pandemic — the month of denial, the veering messaging and policy, the rage-tweeting, the shrugging surrender to a summer spike — with the growing toll of American dead, and you have the strongest case for NeverTrumpism, distilled: Never mind his policy positions, never mind the perils of liberalism; the risk of a once-in-a-century catastrophe with this guy in charge is just too high.It’s precisely when events seems to vindicate your deepest anxieties, though, that you should be careful about your conclusions. (Ross Douthat, 9/5)

Gov. DeSantis choked up during a press conference last week. He took a time-out — several seconds of silence in front of the media, to compose himself before continuing to discuss his order to allow family members back in to the nursing homes and assisted living facilities where their loved ones have been isolated … since March. The sight was, at once, heart-warming and heart-rending. We have no idea what exactly rendered him speechless that day, but it was a display of empathy that has been missing for far too long from his handling, and mishandling, of the coronavirus pandemic in Florida. (9/7)

The nation has learned a lot of new words and phrases this year. Coronavirus. Contact tracing. Social distancing. Mask up. And, of course, essential workers, who have taught America just how much we depend on one another to conduct our daily lives. And, often, how much we take for granted the work of others. (9/7)

As a physician and former U.S. congressman whose committee had oversight of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, I have been asked questions about COVID-19 public policy. I am not an infectious disease specialist or epidemiologist. However, I have studied this pandemic closely. It is a tragedy. To date it has worldwide caused 25 million known cases and about 1 million deaths, of which about 180,000 are U.S. deaths. Had this pandemic been contained by earlier isolation steps in China and had knowledge of human-to-human transmission been shared by the World Health Organization, there is no question there would have been fewer deaths. (Greg Ganske, 9/6)

Accidents happen. Nonetheless, there is a desire to ascribe blame or fault. It has been asserted, in the absence of evidence, that the COVID-19 Pandemic will open the floodgates for COVID-19 related lawsuits against businesses. As a result, companies will hesitate to re-open. Senate Bill 4317, one of several pandemic-related proposals Senate Republicans introduced on July 27, 2020, co-sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), provides what is tantamount to absolute immunity from COVID-19 related lawsuits under the pretense of precluding unsubstantiated COVID-19 claims and protecting health care professionals. (Brian Marks, 9/7)

If you liked 2018’s Proposition 8, which put tens of thousands of medically vulnerable Californians in the middle of a multimillion-dollar battle between dialysis clinics and the union that wants to organize them, then you’ll love this year’s Proposition 23. The statewide initiative reprises the same dreary contest in slightly different form, forcing voters to weigh in twice on a matter that shouldn’t have been put to them once. While the earlier initiative would have capped dialysis clinics’ profits, the key provision of Prop. 23 would require them to have a physician on site during treatment hours. Despite the superficial appeal of the idea, putting voters in charge of specialized medical staffing doesn’t make much more sense than asking them to micromanage the clinics’ finances. But sense is not really the point so much as dollars. (9/5)

The Missouri attorney general’s office has once again hitched the state to an extremist partisan endeavor with other red states, this time in defense of President Donald Trump’s right to lie to America about election security. Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and his counterparts from three other Republican-run states have banded together to back the administration’s push to prevent social-media flagging of Trump’s false claims about voter fraud. This comes after Schmitt continued his predecessor’s involvement of Missouri in a federal lawsuit seeking to kill the Affordable Care Act, endangering the medical coverage of potentially a million Missourians with preexisting medical conditions (9/5).

Overwhelmingly, those facing mental health crises don’t need handcuffs. They need help. Yet, more than 2 million people with mental illness are booked into jails each year. Data also shows a troubling correlation between calls to 911 related to mental health crises and the incidence of excessive force. With our nation still in the throes of a long and overdue national conversation about systemic racism and the impact of policing on communities of color, it is critical that we find new ways to address individuals in crisis. This urgency is underscored by the approaching “second pandemic” of mental health crisis that the novel coronavirus has caused because of social isolation, economic disruption and traumatic stress. (Tom Hucker, 9/4)