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Bernard Lown, doctor at the vanguard of cardiac care, antiwar activist who shared Nobel Peace Prize, dies at 99

In 2012, he helped found the Lown Institute. The Brookline organization describes its mission as “to catalyze a grass-roots movement for transforming health care systems and improving the health of communities.”

“Dr. Lown embodied a rare combination of technical skill, scientific acumen, and profound humanism,’' said Dr. Vikas Saini, president of the Lown Institute, in a statement. “His commanding yet deeply comforting presence allowed him to connect with his patients in a way that was truly dazzling to generations of young doctors in training at Harvard.’'

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The Case for Helping the World Get Vaccinated

By buying up the vast majority of available vaccines and not using government powers to ramp up production, wealthy countries, including the United States, are making it all but impossible for poorer countries the get their citizens vaccinated. That’s shortsighted. As long as large swaths of the globe remains unvaccinated, we all remain at risk from a virus that is free to mutate rapidly and is already proving capable of evading at least one vaccine. The Biden administration is going to have to decide what role the U.S. government will play to ensure that poorer nations get the vaccine quickly and affordably. If the United States and other wealthy countries do not find a way to increase production and lower prices, people around the world will die unnecessarily and U.S. economic and geopolitical interests will suffer. More

Is a cancer crisis trailing the pandemic?

The way the pandemic has deferred some primary and preventive care is rekindling debate over whether the U.S. is spending too much on diagnostic tests. Lown Institute President Vikas Saini doesn’t think Covid will move the needle on how doctors and patients approach medical care, with demand for tests and services returning once the crisis lifts. “There's been chatter, and people speculating or saying it's a great opportunity because there's all this elective stuff that got stopped [so] when we resume, maybe we should be more thoughtful — yeah, we should," he says. "But what's actually going to happen? I don't see any reason to think it won't go back to business-as-usual." More