The Biden administration has failed to reach its July 4th goal of 70% vaccinations among

eligible people. Only 58% of American adults are fully vaccinated. Meanwhile, COVID-19 cases

start to tick upward across the country as the Delta variant spreads among unvaccinated

people.

A new analysis shows that during the 2020 election cycle, Big Pharma funded over 2400 campaigns

for state legislators across the country. This is America Dissected, I'm your host,

Dr. Abdul Al-Sahid. Welcome back.

For the first time in 16 months, my family and I traveled beyond what we could reasonably

drive. Our travels took us to new places we'd never seen before, and places whose contours

have shaped part of our lives. We delighted in the time we had away from home, our reminder

that travel is a gift, one that the science of vaccines newly made possible. But just

underneath that joy and gratitude was an aching nostalgia. The realization that all of

these things that we've taken for granted before had been profoundly off limits for the

past 16 months. My daughter lived nearly half her life during that time, and we were

the lucky ones. For so many others who work in these industries, the past 15 months have

meant joblessness, profound insecurity about meeting the most basic needs, let alone the

stresses of COVID-19 itself. For so many others, this pandemic left 600,000 human sized

holes in families and hearts. The irony of my time away was that I got a view of the

pandemic from beyond my four walls and what I could find in digitized images on the internet.

The reality of this, all that we lost, came into much clearer focus.

The mental health consequences of this pandemic have been and will continue to be profound. After

all, we've lived through a 16 month collective trauma, with loss of lives and livelihoods

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