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A small group of women at a recent City Council meeting held hands and offered hushed prayers in an otherwise silent room. Everyone was waiting for the council members to decide whether their community would become the next “sanctuary city for the unborn.” No one was trying to build an abortion clinic in the Texas community of Lindale, population 6,000. But they wanted to keep it that way. (Searcey, 3/3)

Since Iran announced its first cases of the novel coronavirus more than two weeks ago, a growing number of analysts and physicians have questioned Tehran’s death toll tallies. Others, including one of Iran’s own members of parliament, have accused the government of deliberately covering up the extent of the outbreak in the country. Despite a rising domestic and international clamor, Iran has been unwilling to quarantine high-risk areas and has yielded to its clerical establishment by not barring the public from visiting major religious sites at the epicenter of the virus. The Iranian government’s policy blunders are now responsible for Iran’s status as the main center of contamination and exporter of the coronavirus outside China. (Afkhami, 3/3)

As panicked consumers buy up hand sanitizer, masks, and other supplies in the hopes of staving off the fast-spreading coronavirus, a shadowy array of grifters and opportunists are flocking to Amazon.com and other online booksellers to capitalize on public fear, producing a steady stream of books and manuals that claim to hold the secret to surviving the outbreak. Since late January, hundreds of titles related to Covid-19 — as the disease caused by the virus is known — have come up for sale online, many of which appear to be written under false or misleading names. One series of books, which includes “Coronavirus 101: Everything You Should Know to Avoid Illness and Protect Yourself from the Wuhan 2020 Outbreak” and “Coronavirus and Face Masks: The Truth,” claim to be co-authored by a Dr. Zoe Gottlieb. (Roberts, 3/6)

[A] 30-second ad, titled “Opposite,” was shown during the Democratic primary debate in Nevada; another, “Priorities,” ran during the one in South Carolina, part of a multimillion-dollar ad campaign in early battleground states. They were promoted online, across Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter, and in paid slots on YouTube’s home page. A similar ad, in Spanish and featuring a Hispanic mother and daughter, ran on Univision and on Spanish-language websites. All this was purchased by the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, a group formed in 2018 and funded, you will not be shocked to learn, largely by groups representing the hospital, insurance and pharmaceutical industries. “Opposite” is notionally about health care, but if the sound was turned off, you would hardly know it. There are no hospitals or patients, no sickness or injury, no healing. (Yes, there’s the doctor, but she’s alone.) It’s as if the ad knows, deep down, that presenting a rosy picture of an actual American health care access scenario would risk too many viewers erupting in laughter. (Baker, 3/4)