Anne Sosin on surviving Covid and studying Vermont's response

When Anne Sosin contracted Covid-19 in early April, a disease that had been the focus of her academic work suddenly became personal. Sosin, a policy fellow at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy at Dartmouth College, has worked globally on public health initiatives. Lately, she has been studying how rural communities in Vermont and New Hampshire have responded to the pandemic. She has a been a rare public health expert who has publicly criticized Gov. Phil Scott’s relaxation of health restrictions as he moves to reopen the state by early July 2021. Sosin has warned against opening up too quickly and endangering the health of young people, in particular. Her warnings have been prescient, as Vermont has seen a spike of infections among students as schools have re-opened to in-person instruction and indoor sports have resumed. Her prescience hit home when her daughter’s child care provider called her a few weeks ago to say that she had a positive Covid test result. Sosin and her daughter both tested positive. She first spoke publicly about this to VTDigger last week. An expert on health inequities, Sosin sees a worrisome trend if large regions of the country have low vaccination rates against Covid-19. “The pandemic requires putting an end to the epidemic not only in Vermont and other northeastern states, but in the rest of the U.S. and the rest of the world,” she says. “If we get to a situation where we have large parts of the country that remain unvaccinated, we’re not going to see an end and we really risk having this rage on for months, if not years, to come.”