Reporter's Notebook

The American Futures Notebook
Show Description +

On this page you’ll find notes arising from American Futures project that Deborah and James Fallows have had underway, with some appearances on Marketplace radio, since 2013. Their full archive is here.

Sort Notes
Newest First Oldest First
Show 67 Newer Notes

The Making of a Cover, American Futures Edition

Last two iterations of the cover for our upcoming issue.

Next week a cover story whose writing and editing has tied me up for quite a while, and whose reporting has engaged my wife Deb and me over the past few years, will come out in print and on line. (Subscribe!)

Just now Darhil Crooks, creative director of the newly crowned Magazine of the Year,  described the process by which he came up with a very nice cover image — plus the interior layout of the story. You can read it here. One of the great satisfactions of magazine journalism is the coming-together of many different kinds of imaginative talents and sensibilities. Part of Darhil Crooks’s genius is being able to move from an editor-level grasp of the argument and tone and ambition of a written story, to the right photographic, layout, illustration, cover-design, and other graphical means through which the message can be conveyed and enhanced. It’s like a good words-and-music combo, in that the pairing seems “natural” or even “inevitable” once you’ve heard or seen it, but (in my case) I could never have imagined it before knowing what the design team has figured out.

As a preview to the piece, here is the “dek,” the summary on the opening page:

Most Americans believe the country is going to hell. They’re wrong. What a three-years journey by single-engine plane reveals about reinvention and renewal—and about how the Second Gilded Age might end.

And here is an intermediate passage on the rationale behind this venture:

There is a high-toned tradition of road trips as a means of “discovering” America, from Lewis and Clark and Tocqueville through John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, and William Least Heat Moon (whose Blue Highways made its debut in these pages). Apart from other obvious points of contrast, our project was different in that rather than going by car (or wagon, or pirogue), we’ve gone from city to city in our family’s small single-engine propeller airplane, a Cirrus SR22. This was a decision made for convenience, for beauty, and for edification….

The beauty comes from the privilege and unending fascination of watching the American landscape unfurl below as you travel at low altitude. At the dawn of powered flight, a century ago, it was assumed that writers and painters would want to become aviators, and vice versa…  

A coast-to-coast drive across America has its tedious stretches, and the teeming interstate corridors, from I-95 in the east to I-5 in the west, can lead to the despairing conclusion that the country is made of gas stations, burger stands, and big-box malls. From only 2,500 feet higher up, the interstates look like ribbons that trace narrow paths across landscape that is mostly far beyond the reach of any road. From ground level, America is mainly road—after all, that’s where cars can take you. From the sky, America is mainly forest in the eastern third, farmland in the middle, then mountain and desert in the west, before the strip of intense development along the California coast.

It’s also full of features obvious from the sky that are much harder to notice from the ground (and difficult to pick out from six miles up in an airliner): quarries at the edge of most towns, to provide gravel for roads and construction sites; prisons, instantly identifiable by their fencing (though some mega high schools can look similar), usually miles from the nearest town or tucked in locations where normal traffic won’t pass by. I never tire of the view from this height, as different from the normal, grim airliner perspective as scuba diving is from traveling on a container ship.

More to come about the magazine piece, and some new online accompaniments, next week. That is what will keep me busy over the weekend.

Update: Please read on for a new photo contest concept.

Continue Reading
If You're Going to be in Redlands or San Bernardino This Weekend...

… please come to the first American Futures conference at the University of Redlands, on Friday evening, January 29, and Saturday during the day. You can find agenda and sign-up information here.

Glamour shot of the University of Redlands, where the conference will be held

At the conference, my wife Deb and I will be discussing what we have found in our past two-plus years of traveling around the country for our American Futures project — which will also be the subject of a cover-story package, with articles by both of us, in the forthcoming March issue of the magazine. (Subscribe!) One of the themes of that presentation is how much more functional American governance and civil-society seem at the city-by-city level than they do, at the moment, on the national scale.

At the conference, mayors whose strategies and records we’ve chronicled in this project will speak about what they’ve done, how they did it, and what lessons can be gleaned from, and applied more broadly, from the stories of their towns. They will include Rusty Bailey, mayor of Riverside, California; Don Ness, who recently completed two terms as mayor of Duluth, Minnesota; Ashley Swearengin, in her second term as mayor of Fresno, California; Nan Whaley, beginning her third year as mayor of Dayton, Ohio; and Knox White, who as mayor of Greenville, South Carolina, since 1995 is the longest-serving mayor in that city’s history.

Plus at least one and maybe more Bonus Mayors! And a session on GeoDesign at the Redlands-based software company Esri, one of our partners in this project.

I can tell you first-hand that these mayors all have very interesting personal and civic stories to tell. You’re likely to keep hearing about them (and not just from me) over the years. If you’ll be in the vicinity, please check out the site for more info and come by.

If You're in Fresno, Please Stop in at Peeve's Public House
Craig Scharton (right) in 2014 at his Peeve’s Public House in downtown Fresno. With him is Oscar Fuentes, who was the beer buyer for Peeve’s then and now has started his own brewery.

During our visits to Fresno, in California’s Central Valley, over the past two years, my wife Deb and I have made regular stops at Peeve’s Public House, on the downtown Fulton Mall.

Initially this was because the proprietor, Fresno patriot and publican Craig Scharton, was the first person to argue to us (at a chance meeting elsewhere in California) that tattered-looking Fresno was worth serious attention as a city turning itself around. After heavy initial skepticism, we became convinced. You can read the summary version of why we changed our minds here, or the full chronicles here. On return trips to Fresno we kept going back to Peeve’s because we liked the beer, food, and atmosphere there. And increasingly we came to respect its role as a civic center, in a part of town very much in need of such a thing. Here was the event board on our first visit:

The Fulton Mall area where Peeve’s has been an anchor and outpost (it’s one of the few businesses now open at night) is in the middle of a mammoth construction project, whose details you can read about here. In the long run, the overhaul is meant to spur downtown Fresno’s revival. In the short run, it’s yet another challenge for the businesses already there.

Continue Reading
Ajo Update: Emily and Stuart Get Married
Stuart and Emily Siegel, of Ajo, Arizona, at their wedding this month at the Sonoran Desert Conference Center in Ajo. Photo by Margaret Collins, from her flickr collection.


Early this year my wife Deb and I filed several reports from the genuinely startling and inspiring small town of Ajo, Arizona. Ajo is far away from pretty much everything except the spectacular Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. Also nearby, for warplane fans, is the Barry Goldwater bombing range just to the north, as described here.  Just to the east is the large tribal land of the Tohono O’odham Nation, and there is a big Border Patrol station to the south of town.

A century ago, Ajo was the site of an enormous open-pit copper mine. Thirty years ago, the mine closed suddenly, leaving a gigantic (but interesting!) lunar-surface-scale crater as a landmark but removing most of the town’s economic reason for being.

Over the past ten years, indefatigable teams of activists, artists, entrepreneurs, dreamers, and volunteers and others have set about rebuilding and reviving the town. Deb told part of their story here and here, and I compared it with some other small-town, arts-based revival efforts in the United States and China here. Seriously, if you didn’t read this earlier report by Deb, please check it out.

The centerpiece of current efforts in Ajo is the new Sonoran Desert Conference Center, a combination resort / retreat / meeting place / educational center being built in a beautiful, architecturally striking former school, shown below.

Sonoran Desert Conference Center, photo by Emily Siegel
Continue Reading
The President of Maine Maritime Weighs In

Here's the back story: In our American Futures reports from Down East Maine, my wife Deb and I wrote about the (obvious) importance of the seacoast in the region’s past and future, and John Tierney wrote specifically about the achievements of the Maine Maritime Academy in Castine.

Maine Maritime Academy seal (MMA)

Last week Maine Maritime was honored (again) as a leading “value added” institution, raising its graduates’ earnings. A reader wrote in to dissent, on two points. First, he said the high earnings were an artifact of unusual legal protections for the merchant-marine industry (summed up as “the Jones Act”), which sheltered it from world competition. Second, he said that when he was teaching at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, he thought the students were mediocre and under-motivated.

I answered on the first, main point by saying: that’s not really a rap against Maine Maritime. Merchant shipping is a perilous activity — as it happens, five MMA alumni were among the 33 people lost recently on the El Faro — and if the earnings are “unnaturally” high, that’s not MMA’s fault. It would be like saying that medical schools didn’t really raise their graduates’ earnings, since under a different medical system doctors wouldn’t be paid as much.

Today I got a note from the president of the Maine Maritime Academy, William J. Brennan, in fuller response to the reader’s letter. Here it is, with a few explanatory notes inserted:

***

The reader’s view is unfortunate and contrary to my view of Kings Point [the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy] and its cadets, which in my experience, is a great college with wonderful students.  But this federal academy, as you point out, is much different from Maine Maritime Academy, which is a state institution, attendance at which requires students to pay tuition, unlike their Kings Point counterparts.

Continue Reading
The Fresno-Detroit Link: Poetry, and the Unglamorous Home of American Dreams

Two days ago I mentioned that a “Fresno reborn” video had a similar tone and toughness to the famous “Imported From Detroit” Eminem/Chrysler ad from the 2011 Superbowl that was an early sign of rebound of the auto industry and its iconic home city.

A reader who knows both places writes to emphasize other connections. This reader is Rick Jones, who grew up in Detroit but now lives in one of the most fashionable parts of prospering California.

The first connection involves one of Fresno’s best-known contemporary figures. This was the late poet Philip Levine — son of assembly-line Detroit, former Poet Laureate of the United States, long-time teacher at Fresno State.

Philip Levine, at the time of his selection at U.S. Poet Laureate in 2011 (AP photo)


Jones says of Levine:

While most of his poems are staged in Detroit (this is an example), they evoke the Fresno of today equally well.

He goes on to spell out the link, playing off my earlier comment that “I realize I am becoming a sucker for places and cultures, like Fresno and Detroit, whose theme is: ‘OK, you want to look down on us? That’s just fine, go ahead and feel smug, because then you’ll be all the more surprised and unprepared when you see what we can do.’” Jones says:

I am a winemaker that lives in Napa but works with wineries in “the valley,” a label all of us in our profession use to name the big area between Sacramento and Bakersfield with Fresno at its center. [JF note: aka The Central Valley or the San Joaquin Valley.]

I also grew up and spent the first 18 years of my life in Detroit.  While I live in the middle of  glamorous Napa, every time I go to the valley I feel like I'm going home.

I think you're a bit hard on yourself, when you suggest your admiration for these formerly forlorn and neglected places is merely sentimental.

If the American idea or dream or project, or whatever we are calling it these days now is to have any meaning, that meaning resides in Fresno and in Detroit as much, if not more than in Cupertino or Boston.

Obviously I agree, and am trying to learn about, and tell the story of, how and whether that dispersed and less glamorous dream may take shape.

Here's the Back Story on the 'Fresno Reborn' Video (With Eminem and Detroit Bonus Features)

Over the weekend I mentioned the new video by our friends at the Bitwise tech incubator in Fresno, California, which exemplified the gritty spirit — “You think we’re losers? Well just watch” — that we’ve admired and described about the city.

I asked Jake Soberal, co-founder with Irma Olguin of Bitwise, how the video came to be. Here’s his answer, and after that two other notes about its tone and approach.

Jake Soberal writes:

As to the back story, it's a neat one. For some time we have been planning for a very grand opening. Our belief is that Bitwise South Stadium is a technology hub of global significance. Its opening demonstrates the credibility of our burgeoning technology industry--to locals and the world at large. With that, the grand opening had two aims: (1) celebrate how far tech has come in Fresno, and (2) inspire it to go even further.

Continue Reading
Another Look at Maine Maritime: Who Is Providing Value, to Whom, and How?
MMA logo

Two days ago I mentioned the welcome news that the Maine Maritime Academy, which John Tierney had written about extensively as part of our ongoing American Futures coverage, had been recognized yet again for providing very high career-earnings value to its students, at a low cost.

The context for this was our also-ongoing discussion of the importance of “career technical education,” once sneered-at under the title of “trade schools” or “vocational ed,” as one of the promising steps we’ve seen around the country with potential to offset at least some of the relentless pressure toward a polarized rich-and-poor society.

Now, a reader who once taught at another maritime academy writes in to say, “Hey, wait a minute.”  His point, as you’ll see, is not that there is anything wrong with Maine Maritime itself but rather that the “value added” in higher salaries comes from legislatively protected earnings for merchant seamen.

There are some obvious comebacks to this case, most of which I’ll save for later installments. One I’ll mention now is: this is a demanding and potentially perilous field, as demonstrated long ago by John McPhee in “Looking for a Ship” and very recently by the El Faro tragedy, in which 5 MMA alumni were among the 33 mariners who were lost. And again, the reader’s complaint is not with the school but regulatory regimes more broadly. It is sort of like saying that medical training doesn’t “add value” to graduates’ earnings, since under different payment systems doctors would make less money.

More on these fronts later. For now, the reader’s response on Maine Maritime. He begins by noting that the 15 schools that got perfect 100 scores in a recent “value added” study included several maritime academies:

Looking over the list, all the maritime academies are represented. Since they all seem to get the top score of 100, there is nothing special about the Maine academy. [JF note: actually, at least two state-run maritime academies did not get a top score. Still, the reader’s point is that this type of school seems over-represented.]

I used to teach at the US Merchant Marine Academy in King’s Point, NY. It is true that students who graduated did get good jobs. But I think this is really an exceptional industry, one in which the Federal Government has acted in several ways to improve the earnings of it’s graduates.

Continue Reading
Wondering Why We Like Fresno?

For previous installments in the Fresno saga, please check here. Early last year, in our American Futures saga, we reported on Bitwise, a tech incubator, training school, entrepreneur center, and overall social force in one of California’s least-fashionable cities.

The video below shows the way Bitwise has announced its opening of a big, new center in Fresno’s long-bedraggled, now-recovering downtown. People in San Francisco or New York can be smugly confident in their coolness. We like, better, the Fresno kick-ass spirit.


I've asked Jake Soberal, of Bitwise, for the back story about the script and dramatic presentation of this video. Will report when I know. For now, congratulations to Soberal, his co-founder of Bitwise Irma Olguin, and all others involved.

Another Honor for Maine Maritime Academy, at an Important Time
Maine Maritime Academy, in Castine (MMA)


In our American Futures dispatches from Down East Maine, John Tierney did several reports (collected here) about the Maine Maritime Academy, based in Castine.

These were early entries in what has become one of our central themes. That is the importance of what used to be dismissively known as “vocational education” or even “trade schools,” and now might be called “career technical education” or go by other names—but which, by any name, has a newly crucial economic and social-mobility role.

The caricature view of today’s economy, which is uncomfortably close to the truth, is that it is separating into financiers and rentiers at the top end, and on the other end the people who feed, care for, drive, clean, teach them yoga, and otherwise attend them. The large-scale factory-based jobs that broadened the middle class of the 20th century are obviously not coming back.

The main “good middle-class jobs” that are increasing are in the skilled trades. Welders, high-end repair technicians, engineering-type jobs in health care and logistics and agriculture and aerospace, and on down a long list. That’s where “career technical education” — in K-12 schools, at community colleges, at local tech centers, wherever — comes in.

As does Maine Maritime.

Continue Reading
More Notes From The Atlantic
Most Popular On The Atlantic
  • An Orca whale emerges from the water
    Getty

    Iceland’s Orcas Will Do Anything to Avoid a Pilot Whale
    Hakai Magazine
    Marina Wang

    One of the ocean’s top predators has met its match.

    Filipa Samarra could hear the pilot whales before she could see them. In 2015, out on the choppy waters off of southern Iceland, Samarra and her research team were eavesdropping on a group of killer whales. She listened as they pipped, squealed, and clicked when suddenly her ears were filled with high-pitched whistling. “Then the killer whales just went silent,” says Samarra, a biologist and the lead investigator of the Icelandic Orca Project. As the whistling grew stronger, a group of pilot whales came into view, and the killer whales seemed to turn and swim away.

    “It’s quite unusual because the killer whale is this top predator,” says Anna Selbmann, a doctoral candidate at the University of Iceland who is supervised by Samarra. “It’s very unusual that they’re afraid of anything—or seemingly afraid.”

    Continue Reading
  • A black-and-white photo of the interior of an Episcopalian church. In the center of the image, a priest is backlit by sunlight coming through a stained glass window.
    Gregory Shamus / Getty

    My Church Doesn’t Know What to Do Anymore
    Elizabeth Felicetti

    Last year was hard, but at least the answers were straightforward.

    After fielding back-to-back complaints about masks in church—one regarding a fellow parishioner who had shirked a mask during a recent service and the other wondering whether our congregation had changed its policy from “strongly recommended” to “required,” because “everyone” was wearing them—I realized something surprising: Leading a church is harder now, in 2021, than it was in 2020, during the worst of the coronavirus pandemic. Last year, state and diocesan mandates meant I could throw up my hands and respond, “Sorry, not up to me.” And anyway, the answer was, for the most part, a straightforward “no”—no, we can’t gather for services, and no, we can’t sing. Now it is up to me, the rector of St. David’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia, and I am struggling to find a way forward.

    Continue Reading
  • A father has his arm around his child, who is wearing a blank name tag
    LMPC / Getty; The Atlantic

    A Patriarchal Tradition That Just Won’t Budge
    Michael Waters

    Straight, married couples in the U.S. still almost always give kids the father’s last name. Why?

    About a year before Christine Mallinson gave birth to her first child, she and her husband agreed that all of their children would take her last name. The decision came down to family cohesion: The couple wanted their children—they eventually had two—to share a last name with the only cousin near their kids in age, who was Mallinson’s niece.

    Mallinson knew that their choice was not a popular one for heterosexual American couples—she’s a professor of sociolinguistics and gender and women’s studies at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, and wrote a 2017 paper that, in part, analyzes patrilineal surname conventions. In 2002, researchers found that about 97 percent of married couples passed down only the father’s last name to their first kid. That proportion seems to have remained remarkably consistent: A 2017 paper studying adoptive heterosexual parents found that they gave a patrilineal surname to their child 96 percent of the time. Though few studies on the topic have been conducted, evidence suggests that in almost every American family with a mom and a dad, children receive their father’s last name.

    Continue Reading
  • An illustration of the word "We" from the U.S. Constitution on a blue piece of parchment paper in the crosshairs of a red target
    Getty; The Atlantic

    The Second Amendment Has Become a Threat to the First
    Diana Palmer
    Timothy Zick

    Firearms are having a documented chilling effect on free speech.

    Many Americans fervently believe that the Second Amendment protects their right to bear arms everywhere, including at public protests. Many Americans also believe that the First Amendment protects their right to speak freely and participate in political protest. What most people do not realize is that the Second Amendment has become, in recent years, a threat to the First Amendment. People cannot freely exercise their speech rights when they fear for their lives.

    This is not hyperbole. Since January 2020, millions of Americans have assembled in public places to protest police brutality, systemic racism, and coronavirus protocols, among other things. A significant number of those protesters were confronted by counterprotesters visibly bearing firearms. In some of these cases, violence erupted. According to a new study by Everytown for Gun Safety and the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), one in six armed protests that took place from January 2020 through June 2021 turned violent or destructive, and one in 62 turned deadly.

    Continue Reading
  • Illustration of Jesus Christ.
    Getty ; The Atlantic

    The Evangelical Church Is Breaking Apart
    Peter Wehner

    Christians must reclaim Jesus from his church.

    The election of the elders of an evangelical church is usually an uncontroversial, even unifying event. But this summer, at an influential megachurch in Northern Virginia, something went badly wrong. A trio of elders didn’t receive 75 percent of the vote, the threshold necessary to be installed.  

    “A small group of people, inside and outside this church, coordinated a divisive effort to use disinformation in order to persuade others to vote these men down as part of a broader effort to take control of this church,” David Platt, a 43-year-old minister at McLean Bible Church and a best-selling author, charged in a July 4 sermon.

    Platt said church members had been misled, having been told, among other things, that the three individuals nominated to be elders would advocate selling the church building to Muslims, who would convert it into a mosque. In a second vote on July 18, all three nominees cleared the threshold. But that hardly resolved the conflict. Members of the church filed a lawsuit, claiming that the conduct of the election violated the church’s constitution.

    Continue Reading
  • Denis Villeneuve with Timothee Chalamet on the set of 'Dune'
    Chia Bella James / Warner Bros. Entertainment

    The Blockbuster That Hollywood Was Afraid to Make
    David Sims

    “The first audience member I wanted to please was myself,” the director Denis Villeneuve said of tackling his Dune adaptation.

    When I asked him about his film adaptation of Dune, the writer-director Denis Villeneuve quickly held up his prized copy of Frank Herbert’s book, a French-translation paperback with a particularly striking cover that he’s owned since he was 13. “I keep the book beside me as I’m working,” Villeneuve told me cheerfully over Zoom. “I made this movie for myself. Being a hard-core Dune fan, the first audience member I wanted to please was myself. Everything you receive is there because I love it.”

    His enthusiasm is infectious, but that’s a bold approach to making a movie with a reported $165 million budget, only the second big-screen adaptation of the highest-selling science-fiction novel of all time. The first, David Lynch’s 1984 effort, was such a critical and financial flop that Lynch still hates the mere mention of it. That film’s failure gave the book a reputation for being unadaptable: too long, unwieldy, and dense with lore to work on a blockbuster scale. But to Villeneuve, Dune’s immense depth and breadth are strengths, not challenges—his movie thrives in the little details, rather than trying to rush through them in search of a Hollywood ending.

    Continue Reading
  • broken in dashboard of wrecked car
    Nicolai Howalt

    We Should All Be More Afraid of Driving
    Joshua Sharpe

    Two terrifying car accidents taught me that, despite what we like to believe, we can’t control what happens on the road.

    I thought I saw something in the road.

    It was after 1 a.m. one night in April 2016, and I was heading home from a friend’s house on the outskirts of Atlanta. From a distance, the dark spot looked like an oil stain. Then she turned her head and my headlights lit her face. A woman in dark clothing was standing in my lane on Interstate 75. I pounded the brake, but I was too late.

    Her body crashed into my windshield and her head hit the top of my car before she landed, crumpled, in the middle of the highway. When my car finally stopped, I raced over to her. I felt sure she was dead. But when I reached down to pick her up off the road, she moved.

    After the police arrived, an officer took me aside and told me how the investigation would go. The police would impound my car, and if, after 24 hours, it appeared the woman would live, they’d release the vehicle. If she died, or appeared likely to die, investigators would need to test the car’s computer system to make sure the data aligned with my statements.

    Continue Reading
  • A photograph of a technician looking at the James Webb Space Telescope's gold-covered mirrors
    David Higginbotham / NASA

    This Isn’t the Big Telescope Debut NASA Imagined
    Marina Koren

    The James Webb Space Telescope, the long-awaited successor to Hubble, is mired in controversy over its namesake.

    Updated at 2:08 p.m. ET on October 27, 2021

    In 1999, Karen Knierman picked up a free mug at her first big astronomy conference, just before she started grad school. It bore the logo of an ambitious observatory, designed to peer at the most distant galaxies in the universe: NGST, short for Next Generation Space Telescope. The mug was on Knierman’s desk in 2002 when NASA made a surprise announcement: NGST was going to become JWST, after James Webb. Knierman sipped from her suddenly out-of-date mug and wondered, Who?

    That was the prevailing reaction among scientists at the time. Webb, who died in 1992, was more of a behind-the-scenes manager than a space-science star; he had served as NASA’s second administrator, in the 1960s, during the run-up to the Apollo moon landings. But scientists went with the rebrand. Work on the telescope continued. Scientists got new merch, new mugs.

    Continue Reading
  • A pyramid balances on its point, upside down, in the desert with blue sky and 3 small figures
    Illustration by Rodrigo Corral. Sources: Hugh Sitton / Getty; Been There YB / Shutterstock

    Human History Gets a Rewrite
    William Deresiewicz

    A brilliant new account upends bedrock assumptions about 30,000 years of change.

    Many years ago, when I was a junior professor at Yale, I cold-called a colleague in the anthropology department for assistance with a project I was working on. I didn’t know anything about the guy; I just selected him because he was young, and therefore, I figured, more likely to agree to talk.

    Five minutes into our lunch, I realized that I was in the presence of a genius. Not an extremely intelligent person—a genius. There’s a qualitative difference. The individual across the table seemed to belong to a different order of being from me, like a visitor from a higher dimension. I had never experienced anything like it before. I quickly went from trying to keep up with him, to hanging on for dear life, to simply sitting there in wonder.

    Continue Reading
  • children in masks gathered at a New York elementary school
    Michael Loccisano / Getty

    Five Big Questions About COVID Vaccines for Kids
    Katherine J. Wu

    With FDA authorization for a kid-size COVID vaccine pending, a pediatrician and infectious-disease expert weighs in on what’s next.

    Some good news finally—finally—appears to be on the horizon for roughly 28 million of the United States’ youngest residents. On the heels of an advisory meeting convened yesterday, the FDA is likely on the cusp of green-lighting a kid-size dose of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for Americans ages 5 to 11, a move that’s been months in the making.

    After the agency’s expected emergency authorization, Pfizer’s formulation will need a recommendation from CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, who’s expected to weigh in next week, after her own advisory committee holds a vote. But the nation is ready: Already, 15 million pediatric doses of Pfizer’s vaccine—which will be administered at a third of the amount doled out to adults—have become available for states to order in advance.

    Continue Reading
More Popular Stories