‘If You Arrived From Another Planet’: What We Heard This Week

“If you arrived from another planet and saw two airports a mile apart, one for Black people and another for whites, you’d think this is some kind of weird apartheid…. We don’t do that for airports, but somehow that’s where we’ve ended up with hospitals.” — Vikas Saini, MD, president of the Lown Institute, discussing structural racism in healthcare.

“We need to get to the bottom of this, whatever the answer may be.” — Andy Slavitt, White House senior adviser for COVID-19 response, speaking about the origin of COVID-19 during a press briefing.

“There is not a safe level of benzene that can exist in sunscreen products.” — Christopher Bunick, MD, PhD, of Yale University in New Haven, discussing online pharmacy Valisure finding the carcinogen in sun care products.

“I have a pretty good idea of what the future holds.” — Daniel Gibbs, MD, a neurologist who has early Alzheimer’s disease and wrote a book about his personal battle with the condition.

“The variants we identified in breakthrough cases looked very similar to the ones we identified in our strain surveillance nationwide. There were no red flags.” — Tom Clark, MD, MPH, deputy director of the division of viral diseases at the CDC and lead of the agency’s vaccine evaluation team, on why the agency stopped tracking breakthrough infections unless they cause serious illness.

“These results confirm that with the implementation of these measures, these indoor events are not super spreading events, as they had been previously classified.” — Josep Llibre, MD, PhD, of University Hospital Germans Trias i Pujol in Badalona, Spain, on his study that demonstrated how to safely hold an indoor mass gathering.