We hear a lot in the media about the ongoing challenges with COVID-19 vaccine distribution: managing the complex cold chain requirements of multidose vials; countering anti-vaccination messaging; overcoming vaccine hesitancy; and confronting gross inequities in vaccine distribution.

But at the local level, “where the vaccine gets into arms,” a lot is going right and a lot that has been learned.

JSI staffers Amy Cullum, a nurse, and Laila Akhlaghi, a pharmacist, reflect on their experiences volunteering as Medical Reserve Corps (MRC) members at points of dispensing (PODs) for the COVID-19 vaccine in Virginia and New Hampshire.

Amy Cullum/New Hampshire: The…

International Women’s Day. #ChoosetoChallenge: A challenged world is an alert world. And from challenge comes change.

The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day is designed to inspire us to think more deeply about what else we can do to #ChoosetoChallenge existing inequities related to women’s health across the world.

Recently at JSI, we have begun to take a fresh look at the words that we use in our day-to-day communications and are considering how certain words might not best represent our intentions to address equity issues critical to improving health outcomes for women and children.

Up until now, a…

As a newcomer to design thinking — an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems to identify alternative strategies and solutions that may not be obvious — I am finding it helpful for developing and implementing new public health approaches. Human-centered design (HCD) attempts to understand the expressed and latent needs of end-users to develop the ideas for transformational change.

I regularly depend on (and learn from) JSI’s HCD experts and partners including IDEO.org, Matchboxology, and Media365, who’ve shown how design can improve global health and how design thinking allows end-users to…

Every aspect of life has been affected by COVID-19, and this year’s International AIDS Conference was no exception. While it was the 23rd conference since the inception of the International AIDS Society (IAS), it was the first to be virtual. As its in-person predecessors, the conference was jam-packed with content: there were more than 600 virtual sessions and events: 12 live “prime” sessions; 27 workshops; 70 satellite sessions; 62 abstract sessions; multiple pre-conferences; and hundreds of “on-demand” posters. …

Early in the pandemic, a friend sent me a children’s book that attempted to explain the novel coronavirus to the youngest among us. The book depicted SARS CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, as a large, looming specter that appeared abruptly in a small African village, morphing from one terrifying form to the next, preying upon the most vulnerable, and sending everyone into hiding, leaving the marketplace empty. By the middle of the book, villagers, masked and carrying ample supplies of hand sanitizer, had mobilized to vanquish this new foe. They taught each other about transmission risk and how to…

There is some serious irony in the fact that “The only constant is change” was said by Heraclitus in 500 BCE. Things change — and yet they stay the same.

We are employees of a public health organization, John Snow Inc., (JSI), who, after having worked at JSI offices, were fortunate to be able to work from home when our families relocated. We work with colleagues in seven different states, yet we’ve found a way to work as a cohesive team.

We are the first to acknowledge that working from home during a pandemic is completely different from working from…

Organizational survival and the broader system’s ability to meet the needs of its community depends on planning now.

COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on the U.S. health care system and the economy. Hospitals, in particular, have been hard hit and have had to rapidly adapt their systems, clinical protocols, operations, and staffing to attend to an unprecedented patient load.

We understand first-hand that the economic consequences of COVID-19 will have a much greater toll on providers that serve a disproportionate number of people who are covered by Medicaid, are uninsured, or otherwise vulnerable. Unlike mainstream providers that predominantly serve people who…

The COVID-19 pandemic is changing the landscape for immunization and other primary health care services across the world, including in low- and middle-income countries. While the World Health Organization has issued clear guidance that immunization is an essential service that countries must continue to prevent the resurgence of killer diseases (e.g., measles, polio, pneumonia, whooping cough), damage from COVID-19 is widespread, particularly in lower-income countries that have weak health infrastructures. Major constraints include:

• Transportation disruptions: Vaccine distribution has been interrupted because of fewer flights from manufacturing sites to national warehouses and in-country transport constraints to clinics. …