ABSTRACT
How can health professionals help pass legislation at either a state or national level to effectively address this and future pandemics? In this chapter, Dr. Goldfield makes suggestions that individual physicians and organized medicine should consider tempering the ongoing and needless suffering of this pandemic.
This chapter also makes frequent references to and synthesizes some of the many reports that international and American organizations have produced over the past two years on the COVID pandemic. The reports of the American National Academy of Sciences are particularly important. Their publications and publications of other organizations, such as The Lancet, provide excellent ideas on how we can move forward. Unfortunately, few of the major recommendations pertaining to either the availability of additional streams of money or the fundamental restructuring of our public health system are likely to be implemented—at least not on a national level.
