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Just before the start of the 20th century, about a million people, out of a global population of just 1.5 billion, died in a pandemic that lasted from 1889 to about 1895. The first couple of years were the worst, but it kept flaring up for a few more years before it finally petered out. Sounds painfully familiar. (Mark Gongloff, 12/13)

During the earliest months of the pandemic, it was customary for world leaders to invoke the spirit of wartime solidarity. The sentiment was, in principle, the right one — not only because a global crisis demands coordination on a massive scale but also because of the direct precedent found in how governments approached public health during the bleakest days of the 1940s. (Luke Savage, 12/13)

When I rolled up my sleeve to get the country’s first COVID-19 vaccine, little did I know that Day One of the country’s climb back from our pandemic hell would also be my plunge into life as a public figure. I view that moment on Dec. 14, 2020, now with overwhelming gratitude, as this year’s holiday season started so differently. The weekend with my grandson and Thanksgiving meal with my mother are a beautiful, stark contrast from this time last year. (Sandra Lindsay, 12/13)

On March 31, 1977, as a measles epidemic swept through Los Angeles, the L.A. County Public Health Department issued an ultimatum to the parents of the county’s 1.6 million schoolchildren: Get your kids vaccinated within a month or keep them home. The “no shots, no school” warning was a novel threat at the time. Since the 1920s, when deadly smallpox was still around, no major city in the United States had locked the unvaccinated out of school. (Arthur Allen, 12/11)