‘Stretcher After Stretcher of Bodies’; Vaccine Safeguards

• “While she watched, every elevator in the bay opened its doors, expelling stretcher after stretcher of bodies,” writes Dhruv Khullar, MD, who explores the emotional toll the pandemic is having on Americans ~ The Emotional Evolution of Coronavirus Doctors and Patients (The New Yorker)
• Nicole Lurie, MD, MSPH, and colleagues discuss the guardrails needed for vaccines against the novel coronavirus ~ The Development of COVID-19 Vaccines (JAMA)
• The pandemic has left people struggling to overcome addiction with limited options for care, Giles Bruce writes ~ Coronavirus Crisis Disrupts Treatment For Another Epidemic: Addiction (Kaiser Health News)
• Clyde W. Yancy, MD, MSc, calls on academic medicine to engage with the problem of racial justice and understand that “the fundamentals of equality should be respected” ~ Academic Medicine and Black Lives Matter: Time for Deep Listening (JAMA)
• The flood of research papers published in journals and posted to preprint servers has led some scientists to question if they can really trust what they read, Richard Harris writes ~ The Pandemic Is Pushing Scientists To Rethink How They Read Research Papers (NPR)
• As older adults watch their peers die from COVID-19, many are reflecting on what the future will bring for them in the golden years. Judith Graham discusses the ways in which “death has an immediate presence as never before” for seniors ~ Life Beyond COVID Seclusion: Seniors See Challenges And Change Ahead (Kaiser Health News)
• “The most important sound in the world, to my mind, is the rhythmic huffing of a ventilator in an intensive care unit, its demanding thrusts filling and holding a patient to life,” writes Sherry Green, MS, of her experience waking up from a coma ~ Sounds for a Waking Coma Patient (Annals of Internal Medicine)

Fred N. Pelzman, MD, of Weill Cornell Internal Medicine Associates and weekly blogger for MedPage Today, follows what’s going on in the world of primary care medicine. Pelzman’s Picks is a compilation of links to blogs, articles, tweets, journal studies, opinion pieces, and news briefs related to primary care that caught his eye.