Overcoming “failures of imagination”—rethinking the US covid-19 pandemic response

“We did everything we could.” As physicians, we have uttered these words to countless families when a loved one of theirs has passed away. In medicine, we do everything we can to save the lives of our patients as long as it is not causing them undue harm. Even when these efforts are sometimes not enough, the people in our care are still afforded the dignity of being given every chance—and their families the solace of knowing this.Many times in the low income settings in which we have worked, however, we have seen how the deaths of vulnerable or marginalised people are normalised even when there was much more that could have been done to avoid them. The late Paul Farmer, a doctor and medical anthropologist who was a colleague and mentor to us both, described these preventable deaths as “failures of imagination” that are created by being “socialised for…
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