This is the first story of a two-part series which returns to the impact of COVID-19 in Vermont after five years. The second story, “A visual story of the Covid-19 path through the Vermont”, can be found here.
Five years ago, Vermont health officials announced the first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the state.
Since then, 1,200 Vermonters have died of Covid, countless residents have been infected and hundreds of thousands of coasts have been placed in the arms of Vermonters.
Last month, the Department of Health announced that it stop publishing Covid death and cases after years of daily and weekly follow -up. Change is the last change in the way Vermont now considers Covid as a “Endemic” diseaseMore like influenza or other seasonal diseases than a pandemic which is the point of public health priorities.
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The Vermonters have aged, but has the state become wiser? Are civil servants better and more ready to fight against public health attacks as they arise? Or is the Vermont ready to repeat an unnecessary suffering and death cycle?
Covid’s heritage goes far beyond the impact of the virus itself. Covid has left Vermont with tools that could help meet long -standing public health challenges as well as emerging threats – and with vulnerabilities in public trust and health systems.
The officials of the Vermont Department of Health claim that Covid was the most intimidating challenge they have ever faced, but that left them new tools and structures they have implemented in their daily work.
They also celebrated state history with the virus. Vermont has one of the lowest coastal mortality rates in the country, only behind Hawaii and Puerto Rico, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But this is not how Anne Sosin sees it. Lecturer at Dartmouth College and a researcher in healthy actions, Sosin has thought about how Covid revealed disparities in the Vermont society that continues today.
Sosin said Covid added illness to the “burden” and the RSV in hospitals and health workers during the winter months. He also added a disability “big imprint”, she said. While long is the best known monitoring of COVIVE contractor, experts are barely starting to understand how an infection can cause Long -term health impacts On several bodily systems.
Covid left Vermont – and the nation – with a lasting heritage of distrust and disinformation, which seems to affect the response in public health at the federal level, said Sosin. She said the epidemic of measles propagate in the United States was fed by a vaccination skepticism which started well before the cocovid pandemic, which then amplified it.
“We will see a lot of tragedies in the coming years,” said Sosin. “It will get worse before we recognize, in the end, that we have to rebuild.”
Mark Levine, the outgoing commissioner of the health department, echoes this concern in a statement sent by e-mail.
“While compared to national data, the Vermont remains a leader in immunization – even with figures that I would not boast – he worries me that adoption on preventive measures like vaccination has decreased so shortly after the pandemic reminded us why they are so necessary,” he wrote.
Innovations of the Pandemic Age
Covid has left a mark on how the health service is able to respond to other public health challenges, the staff said.
One of these developments was the monitoring of the covid wastewater, which allows governments of states and premises to measure virus levels in a community by taking samples from wastewater treatment factories.
“Wastewater surveillance has been carried out in university establishments and for research purposes before COVID, but it has really become a public health tool during COVID,” said Patsy Kelso, the state epidemiologist.
The Department’s public health laboratory is now preparing to use wastewater monitoring to measure MPOX, seasonal flu and Candida Auris, a hospital-related disease, she said.
THE The scientific community is also investigating How to use mRNA vaccines, developed for COVID, on other infectious diseases such as flu. Antigen tests that can detect both Covid and the flu are already on the market.
Helen Reid, then director of statement of the state of health, said that the pandemic also revealed the need for the State Ministry of Health to work more closely with community groups that represent marginalized vermans. Covid had a disproportionate impact on Color vermonersolder residents and disabled.
“The very first year of Covid has really exposed what we have known for a long time, namely that health disparities have an impact on high -risk populations and poorly served populations, and we have seen it repeatedly,” said Reid, who now directs the infectious health service division.
The Vermont replied by targeting Awareness of the vaccine For these individuals, and part of this effort has changed the way in which the health service continues to collaborate with marginalized communities. The health service has just done its first “table” exercise – a simulation of emergency preparation – with community groups such as migrant justice and healthy bridges, she said.
Sosin also noted the importance of community organizations to respond to COVIR in a different way. At the start of the pandemic, local efforts like Mutual Aid Groups was an integral part of helping to reach vulnerable vermontes.
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“At the start of the response that the communities would have … a telephone tree, and they would see who was in danger, and they would buy races (for these people),” she said. “We do not sometimes consider it public health, but these are things that allow people to comply with public health.”
The pandemic response at the level of the state and the federal government included a vast expansion of social programs which have directly – and indirectly – assigned people’s health.
“We have seen the unprecedented use of the housing policy as a pandemic control tool” with the housing of vermols not inscribed in motels and the moratorium on expulsions, said Sosin.
The federal government has expanded the admissibility to Medicaid, extended the child’s income tax credit and provided several recovery payments. These initiatives had concrete Impact on children’s poverty In the years, they have occurred.
The federal government has also lifted restrictions on the teleheal, which has been beneficial for access to rural health areas, she said. “Unfortunately,” she said, that Flexibility is about to end Unless the federal government is expanding it – one of the many programs that Sosin said was in danger.
“Emerging threats”
At the beginning of 2025, President Donald Trump published decrees withdraw the United States of the World Health Organization and the Reduction of Aid abroad. His administration announced Hundreds of millions of dollars in funding discounts In institutions conducting health research, something that has been concerned about the country’s ability to prepare for future health challenges.
“We must be able to generate evidence in real time in response to emerging threats. And research institutions play an essential role in this, ”she said. “The existence of a research infrastructure was essential to really understand COVID -19 and to develop tools to respond” – from therapy to tests through vaccines.
These threats include the bird flu or the H5N1, which infected poultry and dairy livestock on a national scale and reported on humans, mainly agricultural workers. The United States has also recently seen a Increase in measles cases Directed by an epidemic in western Texas. Experts have Linked the climb in measles to a drop in infantile vaccination rates.
“There was a conversation around (bird flu) and its potential for pandemic threat. And to a certain extent, I think that is the bad question, ”she said. “The question does not simply concern the pathogenic agent and what will be his trajectory, but rather to what extent we are prepared to respond as a state in the absence of the political response and the federal infrastructure? How are we going to do this without federal resources coming to us? »»
She referred to the newly confirmed American secretary to health and social services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has a long experience of Anti-Vaccinal activism. Kennedy recently recommended Unproven health supplements Treat measles while throwing doubts about the safety of the measles vaccine in the middle of a growing epidemic.
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“There is a great political economy which has fueled the rise of RFK and other extreme personalities,” she said.
Sosin said that “the abdication” of the health response at the federal level stressed the importance of state leaders in the future. “The state must prepare for the void of federal leaders.”
Levine – who refused to be interviewed by Vtdigger on the occasion of the Covid birthday, citing travel plans in the days preceding his Departure of its role at the service of health – shared similar concerns concerning the federal government in Sosin in a statement sent by e-mail.
“The turbulence that we see in public health at the federal level only underlines the fact that here in Vermont, we must be willing to do what it takes to be good neighbors to each other and protect our communities,” said Levine by email.
His best dishes to remember: Vermont, get vaccinated. Despite the initial progress of the state on the vaccine, the absorption of COVIvin and Flu has dropped in recent years.
“I hope that what we see in our vaccination rates is a temporary setback, and that it will not take another disastrous public health emergency to find out if we have learned the right lessons,” he wrote.
Correction: a previous version of this story was wrong on the current title of the post of a public health official with the Vermont Department of Health.