Healthcare advocates on Thursday welcomed a pledge from presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to share any potential Covid-19 vaccine with the rest of the world if elected, calling it an important “step in the right direction” that must be followed up with a substantive plan to reverse President Donald Trump’s “America First” approach to the global pandemic.
“Covid-19 technologies must be treated by the U.S. and all nations as global public goods,” said Emily Sanderson, an organizer with Health GAP, an international advocacy group dedicated to expanding global access to medicine.
“Hoarding, nationalism, pushing people in low-, middle-income, and other upper-middle income countries to the back of the line, blocking healthcare workers’ access to life-saving personal protective equipment, and buying up supplies of current and prospective treatments is a losing prescription for the American people,” Sanderson said.
“All candidates and elected officials should strongly affirm their support for and commitment to global health policies that advance the right to health for people in the U.S. and around the world,” Sanderson continued.
In an interview Wednesday with Medicare for All advocate Ady Barkan, Biden condemned Trump’s withdrawal of the U.S. from the World Health Organization and committed to share any Covid-19 vaccine with the international community if elected president.
“This is the only humane thing in the world to do,” Biden said. “Were I president now, and I propose we do it now, set aside $25 billion to put together a plan now—now, this instant—how we will distribute that vaccine when it’s made available, to guarantee it gets to every American and access is made available to the rest of the world.”
“This guy’s whole idea of America, America on its own, has meant America alone,” Biden added. “It lacks any human dignity what we’re doing.”
‘It lacks any human dignity’ — @JoeBiden criticized Trump for withdrawing from the WHO and promised to share a potential COVID-19 vaccine with the world pic.twitter.com/pJ6BrLHD4v— NowThis Impact (@nowthisimpact) July 8, 2020
On June 29, as Common Dreams reported, the Trump administration announced a deal with pharmaceutical giant Gilead to purchase nearly the company’s entire stock of Covid-19 treatment remdesivir.
Critics around the world warned that the move may have offered a preview of White House behavior should the U.S. become the first nation with access to a coronavirus vaccine.
Brook Baker, a professor of law at Northeastern University and senior policy analyst with Health GAP, said in a statement that the U.S. “must learn the lessons from the global AIDS pandemic, where Big Pharma’s price gouging and obstruction of cost-cutting generic competition resulted in countless preventable deaths in the global South, particularly in countries in sub-Saharan Africa.”
Baker urged Biden to put forth “a concrete plan to dismantle the misguided, dangerous current policy of ‘America first, everyone else to the back of the queue.’”
“Biden must also show how he will overcome patent and other drug company monopolies to ensure adequate supplies of affordable vaccines both in the U.S. and around the world,” said Baker.
“Aggressively expanding manufacturing capacity to meet emergency needs should not be left to the companies—there should be full technology transfer to all capable manufacturers globally so that the world can collectively end this plague sooner rather than later,” Baker added.
The first time the placebo effect really got under my skin was when I read that roughly one-third of people with irritable bowel syndrome improve on placebo treatments alone. Usually this statistic is presented as a fascinating quirk of medicine. My reaction was anger.
Humanity possesses an extremely effective treatment, with essentially zero side effects – and patients need someone else’s permission to use it.
The placebo effect refers to the improvements in symptoms that patients experience after they’re given an inert treatment like a sugar pill. Driven by expectation, context and social cues rather than pharmacology, the placebo effect is often dismissed as all in the mind. But decades of research have shown it is anything but imaginary.
Placebo treatments can trigger measurable changes in the brain, immune system and hormone function. In studies on pain, placebos cause the brain to release endorphins, the body’s natural opioids. In Parkinson’s disease, placebo injections increase dopamine activity in the brain. The placebo effect isn’t magic. It’s biology.
Having spent nearly a quarter-century teachingevolutionary medicine, I’ve come to see placebos not as curiosities of clinical trials but as windows into how human biology responds to social signals. And it’s that relationship that is exactly what makes the placebo effect unsettling.
When testing a new drug, scientists compare its effects to what patients experience on a placebo treatment like sugar pills, saline injections or sham surgery. If the drug doesn’t outperform the placebo, it rarely reaches the public. Placebo responses are common and powerful enough to rival active treatments.
Even surgery isn’t immune to the placebo effect. In several well-documented studies of knee procedures, patients who received sham operations – incisions without the full surgical repair – improved almost as much as those who received the real procedure.
Clearly something real is happening inside the body. But the strangest part of the placebo effect is not that it works. It’s what makes it work.
The prescription of belief
Placebo treatments tend to be more effective when delivered by credible authorities. Pills work better when prescribed by doctors wearing white coats. Expensive pills outperform cheap ones. Injections produce stronger responses than tablets.
Some researchers have even removed the deception from placebo experiments entirely. In open-label placebo studies, patients are directly told they are receiving a placebo; and yet many still report significant improvement.
But look more closely at how these studies are run. Patients are not simply handed a sugar pill and sent home. They receive an explanation from a clinician, in a medical setting, within a structured ritual of care: a context that may be doing much of the biological work.
Even when the deception disappears, the social scaffolding remains. The permission to heal is still being granted by someone else.
The placebo effect extends beyond the patient
The placebo effect is often framed as something happening inside an individual. But it does not operate in isolation.
Consider what happens in veterinary medicine. Dogs and cats cannot believe a treatment they’re given will work; they have no concept of receiving medication. Yet when owners and vets believe an animal is being treated, they consistently report improvements in pain and mobility that medical tests do not confirm.
In one study of dogs with osteoarthritis, owners reported improvement roughly 57% of the time for animals receiving only a placebo.
The animals themselves may not have improved. But the humans caring for them perceived they had. The healing signal, it turns out, travels through the humans in the room.
When healing makes things worse
There have been times when going to the doctor made you less likely to survive. In the 19th century, mainstream medicine was built on bloodletting, purging and doses of mercury and arsenic – treatments that killed as often as they cured.
Homeopathy emerged in the late 18th century precisely in this context. Its founder, Samuel Hahnemann, was a physician horrified by the harm the conventional medicine of his time was causing. His highly diluted versions of contemporary remedies did nothing pharmacologically. But they also did not kill people, which put them decisively ahead of the competition.
Homeopathic patients not only survived but also reported dramatic recoveries from chronic ailments and acute infections alike. During the cholera epidemics of the mid-1800s, patients at homeopathic hospitals had lower death rates than those receiving standard care. Why was that?
The standard cholera treatment of the era was aggressive and exhausting; for a disease that already caused massive fluid loss, doctors often prescribed further bloodletting, along with toxic purgatives such as calomel – a form of mercury – to “flush” the system. In contrast, homeopathic care involved extreme dilutions of substances in water or alcohol, effectively providing hydration and a calm, structured environment without the physiological assault.
Death rates were lower not because homeopathy worked but because the placebo effect – combined with not poisoning patients – was more effective than the medicine of the day.
Healing is not free
The body needs resources to heal from injury and disease. Activating systems such as immune responses, tissue repair and inflammation at the wrong time can be dangerous.
Some researchers have proposed that placebo responses reflect a kind of biological health governor: a system that regulates when the body invests heavily in recovery. Cues from trusted individuals may be exactly the signal the body waits for before committing resources to recovery. A caregiver’s reassurance, a physician’s authority and the rituals of medicine may tell the body that conditions are finally stable enough to devote energy to healing.
If that interpretation is correct, the placebo effect is not a trick of the mind. It is an ancient biological system responding to social information.
Body under stress
The placebo effect resembles another system people struggle with today: the stress response.
Stress evolved to keep you alive in the face of acute danger – predators, famine, immediate physical threat. These days, this useful piece of biological engineering might fire when someone hasn’t replied to your email. The system that once saved people’s lives now makes many miserable over things that would have been unimaginable to their ancestors.
You can talk back to the stress response, consciously reappraising the threat – in other words, reframing a looming deadline not as a catastrophe but as a manageable challenge – to help quiet it. But notice what you cannot do: You cannot simply decide to activate your placebo response. You cannot will yourself to release pain-relieving endorphins by believing hard enough in a sugar pill. For that, you still need the ritual, the white coat, the authority figure. You need someone else.
The stress response, misfiring as it is, remains yours. The placebo response has been outsourced: not because it wasn’t always social, but because even now, people still can’t seem to access it on their own.
The uncomfortable implication
The placebo effect is not a trick of the mind. It is a feature of human biology that people have largely surrendered to whoever performs authority most convincingly.
If belief can activate biological healing pathways, belief can also be manipulated. Charismatic figures, elaborate medical rituals and expensive treatments may produce real improvement in symptoms even when the underlying treatment is physiologically inert. That is how wellness culture works. It leverages the same social scaffolding of care to trigger the body’s internal pharmacy, regardless of whether the treatment itself does anything.
The placebo effect is often celebrated as proof that the mind can heal the body. But I believe that may not be its most interesting lesson. It also reveals that human physiology evolved to take its cues from other people. Your brain, immune system and pain response are not isolated machines. They are deeply intertwined with social signals, expectations and trust.
In a world filled with doctors, advertisements, wellness influencers and elaborate medical rituals, that insight is both fascinating and profoundly maddening. People are walking around with one of the most powerful healing systems ever documented locked inside them, and they can reliably access it only when someone in a position of authority gives them permission.
She was right to be touched. He had actually thought about what she would like. She’s health-conscious, so he tailored the meal to her preferences. As they sat down he proudly explained what he’d made and why.
It was designed, he told her, for her prostate health.
A visibly confused woman tries to think. Photo credit: Canva
Sedlak asked him if he meant his prostate health.
He confidently said no. He meant hers.
Sedlak, an actress and filmmaker with 145K Instagram followers, shared the moment in a video posted on November 22, 2025 under her handle @alexandrasedlak. She described the progression from delight to confusion with great precision. “I am dating a dummy,” she concluded in the video. “But he is my little dummy, and no one can take that away from me ever.”
For reference: the prostate is a gland in the male reproductive system, located below the bladder. Women do not have one. A study published in PMC found that men’s knowledge of gynecologic anatomy tends to be significantly lower than women’s, which at least provides some scientific context for this particular gap running in the other direction.
The comments were predictably delighted. One person suggested she invite him over and cook a meal focused on his ovulation health, then casually ask what part of his cycle he’s in. Another compared him to a golden retriever who should be given head scratches and told he’s a good boy.
He is very caring. He cooked her a whole meal. The organ was wrong but the intention was right.
For more relationship-based content, follow @alexandrasedlak on Instagram.
This finding, based on my team’s synthesis of six decades of research, may come as a surprise. Gender differences in adults’ social sensitivity are famous. Women outperform men at recognizing faces and emotions, and they score modestly higher on measures of empathy. They are likelier to take jobs working with people, such as in teaching and health care, whereas men are likelier to choose jobs working with “things,” such as in engineering or plumbing.
But how early do these differences emerge, and are they a matter of evolution or social learning? For years, some theorists have argued the former: that the difference is innate, built into the brain hardware of girls and boys through Darwinian selection. But this perspective relies almost exclusively on just one high-profile, yet deeply flawed, study of 102 newborns.
Mining the neonatal research trove
Realizing that psychologists have been studying newborns’ social orientation for decades, my team of neurobehavioral researchers and I set out to collect all the data – every published study that has compared boys’ and girls’ attention to social stimuli in the first month of life. Our goal was to better test the hypothesis of an inborn gender difference in attention to, or interest in, other people.
Our study was a systematic review, meaning we searched through every published report indexed in both medical and psychological databases from the 1960s onward.
We cast a wide net, looking for any research that measured newborns’ attention to or preference for human faces or voices and that reported the data separately by gender. Importantly, we did not limit our search to the terms “gender difference” or “sex difference,” since these would bias the collection by potentially excluding studies that failed to find boy-girl differences..
As expected, we unearthed dozens of studies comparing newborn boys and girls on social perception: 40 experiments reported in 31 peer-reviewed studies and involving nearly 2,000 infants. The majority of studies measured the amount of time newborns spent looking at faces, either at a single face or comparing a baby’s preference between two faces of differing social value, such as their own mother versus a woman who was a stranger.
Our data collection was large enough that we were able to carry out meta-analysis, which is a statistical method for combining the results of many studies. Meta-analysis essentially turns many small studies into a single large one. For studies measuring neonates’ looking time at faces, this included 667 infants, half of them boys and half of them girls.
The result was clear: nearly identical social perception between baby boys and girls. There was no significant difference between genders overall, nor was there a difference when we focused only on studies measuring babies’ gaze duration on a single face, or only on studies measuring babies’ gaze preference between two different faces.
Our search also netted two other types of studies. One focused on a remarkable behavior: newborns’ tendency to start crying when they hear another baby cry. An early study found this “contagious crying” to be marginally more common in girls. But when we performed meta-analysis on data across nine contagious-crying experiments, including 387 infants, there was again no solid evidence for male-female difference.
The last dataset we analyzed compared babies’ orientation to both social and inanimate objects using a newborn behavior assessment scale developed by legendary pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton. Across four studies involving 619 infants, girls did pay somewhat greater attention to the social stimuli (a human face or voice), but they also paid more attention to the inanimate stimuli (a ball or the sound of a rattle).
In other words, girls in this test seemed a bit more attuned to every type of stimulus, perhaps due to a general maturity advantage that they hold from fetal development through puberty. But there was nothing special about their interest in people, according to the Brazelton assessment.
Boys, too, prefer faces
Our findings align with other well-designed studies, including one finding that 5-month-old boys and girls equally prefer looking at faces over toy cars or other objects, and another finding that 2-month-old boys actually perform better than girls at detecting faces. So taken together, current research dispels a common myth that girls are innately “hardwired” to be more social than boys in early life.
The truth is that all babies are wired for social engagement at birth. Boys and girls are both primed to pay attention to human faces and voices, which, after all, belong to those who will keep them fed, safe and comforted.
Despite their best intentions, most parents cannot help but stereotype their infants by gender and begin treating boys and girls differently early on. Presuming that sons are already less social is not a recipe for remedying this bias. Our research can help dispel this myth, giving every child, male or female, the best possible start for connecting with and caring about other people.
