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Buoyed by newly published, early data on its experimental Covid-19 vaccine, Moderna on Wednesday cracked onto the list of the 20 most valuable biopharma companies, as measured by market capitalization.Moderna — $31 billion market value — is the only drugmaker in the Top 20 without an approved product. That is a remarkable achievement, especially for a company pursuing an unproven messenger RNA technology. It’s also a depressing indictment of the U.S. response to the pandemic. (Adam Feuerstein, 7/15)

“None of us is safe until all of us are safe.” This statement by United Nations Secretary General António Guterres sums up the momentous challenge ahead. As the world is still in the midst of the deadliest pandemic of the 21st century, with the number of cases still rising at the global level, immunization is our best chance of ending the pandemic at home and across the world — but only if all countries get access to the vaccine. (Justin Trudeau, Sahle-Work Zewde, Moon Jae-in, Jacinda Ardern, Cyril Ramaphosa, Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón, Stefan Lofven and Elyes Fakhfakh, 7/15)

Hubert Humphrey began his career as a pharmacist before going into politics. Today’s politicians sometimes seem to have the opposite aspiration. President Trump “pushes dangerous, disproven drugs,” Joe Biden declares in his “Plan to Beat Covid-19.” “Our country is now stuck with a massive stockpile of hydroxychloroquine, a drug Trump repeatedly hailed.”Neither man has any expertise in pharmacology, and Mr. Trump did get out over his skis in promoting the malaria treatment, also known as HCQ, for the novel coronavirus. But since every Trump action prompts a reaction, his political and media opponents launched a campaign to discredit the drug. This politicized environment has produced dubious science and erratic policy. (Allysia Finley, 7/15)

As Covid-19 cases surge to their highest levels in dozens of states, the nation’s testing effort is on the brink of paralysis because of widespread delays in getting back results. And that is very bad news, because even if testing is robust, the pandemic cannot be controlled without rapid results. This is the latest failure in our national response to the worst pandemic in a century. Since the Trump administration has abdicated responsibility, governors must join forces to meet this threat before the cataclysm that Florida is experiencing becomes the reality across the country. Testing should be the governors’ first order of business. (Margaret Bourdeaux, Beth Cameron and Jonathan Zittrain, 7/16)

As the coronavirus continues to wreak havoc across the United States, some public K-12 schools may be able to reopen safely, but doing so will not be cheap. A recent report from the Council of Chief State School Officers estimated that public K-12 schools will need as much as $245 billion in additional funding to open with the recommended protocols in place from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet with local and state budgets strapped, many schools are likely to fall short unless they receive considerable federal support. The Department of Education, however, has not stepped up to fill that need. Funding for K-12 schools through the Cares Act is $13.5 billion — well below $245 billion. (Jessica Calarco, 7/15)

As a physician taking care of hospitalized Covid-19 patients, I had very nearly become immune to the sickening sensation provoked by new, invariably frightening information about this disease. But as a parent, when I saw the first reports of multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children, the pit in my stomach churned with new ferocity: “15 Children Are Hospitalized With Mysterious Illness Possibly Tied to Covid-19” read the headline in the New York Times. (Sharon Ostfeld-Johns, 7/16)

The monumental decision on whether to reopen Miami-Dade schools in August — and how — is not on Wednesday’s School Board agenda, but it’s likely to pop up. After all, how to deal with this pandemic is the district’s most crucial decision in ages. The burden of deciding whether we continue with online schooling whether we physically return to class — even partially — return to class physically, falls largely on Superintendent Alberto Carvalho and the elected members of the School Board, who rely on his counsel. (7/15)

When schools closed down this spring, our kids’ education and social lives shifted online. Tech companies now have more influence than ever before over children’s lives, but too many platforms haven’t been designed with kids’ safety and wellbeing in mind, and the harms are mounting. Perhaps most disturbing is the surge in reports of online child sexual abuse in recent months. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received more than 4 million such reports in April — an increase of nearly 3 million from April 2019. (Justin Ruben and Josh Golin, 7/15)

San Quentin is California’s most famous, most picturesque, most aged, most poorly designed and most lethal state prison. Its parking lot, down the hill from twin gothic towers (built in the 1850s) and high walls, offers a stunning view of San Francisco Bay and the Bay Bridge — when not threatened by winter storm waves. The perspective is different inside the gates, where cellblocks surround an open atrium-like space designed to give guards a view of each inmate. With the windows to the outside closed off and with prisoners and guards all breathing the same poorly circulated air, it’s the perfect place to transmit a virus, quickly and mercilessly. In such an environment, social distancing is irrelevant. In other words, it’s not a good place to send inmates to shield them from COVID-19. (7/16)