October 3, 2021

Anthony Fauci makes the Sunday rounds, telling ABC’s “This Week” that the country is making progress against COVID-19 while warning that more surges remain possible. Politico reports he sees hope in Merck’s new antiviral pill. The Wall Street Journal runs a dissenting opinion arguing that lessons from the AIDS era have gone unlearned and that the science has been politicized under the banner of following it.

In Britain, the death of a healthy 15-year-old, Jorja Halliday, on the day she was scheduled to be vaccinated becomes a case for pushing shots on secondary-school pupils, with senior doctors and her mother urging teenagers to get the jab. The story spreads widely even as the individual facts of the case remain unclear, showing how a single death can be enlisted to drive policy.

Mandate resistance keeps surfacing at the individual level. CNBC reports that some students are withdrawing from college rather than comply with campus vaccine requirements, one of the quieter forms of attrition running alongside the firings in hospitals and police departments.