New York Times: In Terms of Child Mortality, It’s a Good Time for Public Health
Perri Klass, pediatrician and author

“…[B]elieve it or not, even in 2020, parents in the United States and in many other countries, and not just the very richest, are among the luckiest parents in history. We can, for the most part, hope and even expect to see our children live to grow up, and we live in a society shaped and colored by that expectation. And for all of the anxieties and terrors of this present moment, as parents, we are actually on the lucky side of a divide that separates us from the parents who came before. … Collectively, as human beings, we changed the game. It took science, medicine, and public health, it took sanitation and engineering and safety legislation, and it took many different kinds of education and parent advocacy. And it took vaccines and antibiotics, those 20th century game-changers. … We have to rededicate ourselves to the struggle against the plagues — medical and social — that continue to strike down children, including infections, malignancies, accidents, and violence. But we have come, already, to a place that would look to the parents of a century ago like a place of privilege and safety, and, yes, good luck. And perhaps if we credit the science and medicine and public health and advocacy and education that brought us — and our children — to this place, we can believe in our collective ability to take on the complexities of this new pandemic and to take ourselves and our children to a new safety” (10/12).