• “There’s a second story of the pandemic happening, which is not about ‘It’s time to go back to normal,’ ” Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale epidemiologist and activist, told me. “Normal for whom, and who’s getting left behind? I think that’s where the People’s C.D.C. and others are trying to stake a claim and trying valiantly to make an impact.”
• Gonsalves was deeply involved in aids activism in the nineteen-nineties and early two-thousands; though he is not part of the People’s C.D.C., he’s sympathetic to their project. Throughout the past six months or so, he has watched with dismay as big public-health organizations have lined up behind the White House’s relaxed covid policies, even as more than three hundred people, on average, die from the virus each day.
• Gonsalves and like-minded colleagues had assumed that, after Joe Biden was elected, they’d feel more aligned with the government’s covid policies. That’s not what happened, though. “It wasn’t just Trump. It wasn’t just Biden,” Gonsalves said. “There’s a struggle going on right now for the soul of public health.”

Tagged: COVID-19