International Pandemic Pact, China’s COVID Coverage, and Air Quality

Editors' Note

Health officials met this week in Geneva to discuss an international draft accord that would commit countries to measures to avoid another pandemic disaster on the scale of COVID-19. Our first piece by Amy Maxmen, CFR's Edward R. Murrow press fellow, discusses the latest draft and some important nuances, including its conflicting provisions on drug and vaccine access.

When protests against pandemic measures took place across China recently, popular media outlets in China made no mention of them, running articles instead about the government's new policy of requiring less COVID testing and fewer lockdowns. Our second piece looks at how the threat of repercussions from leadership causes major media in China to tiptoe around sensitive pandemic issues.

U.S. railway companies and their workers' unions have been negotiating for next contract and paid-sick-leave policy has been at the forefront of that discussion. Our next set of authors discusses how tense deliberations have brought public attention to paid sick leave—that it not only protects individual workers' health but also serves as a public health tool that can improve health outcomes for families and communities and make workplaces safer.

We close out the week with two articles on air quality. One calls for more conversations around the urgent situation in regions where pollution is a daily and deadly fact of life, and the second is an interview with K. Sujatha Rao, India's former union secretary for the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, who talks smog and health.

As always, thank you for reading. —Thomas J. Bollyky and Mary Brophy Marcus, Editors  