The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly altered our understanding of public health in the United States. As of February 2024, more than 6.8 million Americans have been hospitalized with COVID-19, and more than 1.1 million Americans have died from COVID-19 (CDC n.d.). These rates place the United States at or near the top of nearly every metric for countries least successful in limiting the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic (JHU 2023; WHO n.d.). The United States already had playbooks in place before COVID-19 for how to handle future pandemics, has among the most advanced medical care in the world, and has the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which was formerly viewed as a paragon of public health globally; but the country has failed miserably in its efforts to control the pandemic (Gadarian et al. 2022). Why has the United States struggled so much to mitigate...

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