ABSTRACT
This concluding chapter highlights the three areas we health professionals should focus on that would, if well implemented, make a significant impact on the course of this and future pandemics: increasing vaccination rates, decreasing misinformation, and implementing at least at a state level community-oriented linkages between public health and acute health. The chapter summarizes the avenues available to address these three areas including an approach that some will consider controversial. One way to better America's pandemic response and, consequently, improve the health of America's population is if more health professionals get involved in COVID and pandemic politics. This engagement should occur at the individual level, through our own organizations that we create, through our health professional societies, and finally, through political involvement. Considering that pandemic politics is intimately tied into overall societal forces at play in the United States, this conclusion is a call for much greater health professional political engagement. Our very country is at stake.
