Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the changing role of scientists, clinicians, ethicists, and educators in advocacy as they rapidly translate their findings to inform practice and policy. Critical efforts have been directed towards understanding child well-being, especially with pandemic-related educational disruptions. While school closures were part of early widespread public health measures to curb the spread of COVID-19, they have not been without consequences for all children, and especially for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. In a recent Isr J Health Policy Res perspective, Paltiel and colleagues demonstrate the integral role of academic activism to promote child well-being during the pandemic by highlighting work of the multidisciplinary academic group on children and coronavirus (MACC). In this commentary, we explore parallels to MACC’s work in an international context by describing the efforts of a multidisciplinary team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, United States, to aggregate data, conduct analyses, and offer training tools intended to minimize health and educational inequities for children throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. As both MACC and our work collectively demonstrates, multidisciplinary partnerships and public-facing data-driven initiatives are crucial to advocating for children's equitable access to quality health and education. This will likely not be the last pandemic that children experience in their lifetime. As such, efforts should be made to apply the lessons learned during the current pandemic to strengthen multidisciplinary academic-public partnerships which will continue to play a critical role in the future.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the changing role of scientists, clinicians, ethicists, and educators in advo‐ cacy as they rapidly translate their findings to inform practice and policy
There is substantial research evidence to demonstrate the critical role of the educational system in lessening achievement and health inequities; multidisciplinary academic group on children and coronavirus (MACC) recognized that pandemicrelated school disruptions could risk widening achievement gaps and exacerbating pre-existing inequities
As a multidisciplinary team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, we had similar experiences to those described by Paltiel et al Here we discuss our efforts to provide technical assistance, aggregate data, conduct analyses, and offer training tools intended to minimize health and educational inequities for children throughout the COVID-19 pandemic
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the changing role of scientists, clinicians, ethicists, and educators in advo‐ cacy as they rapidly translate their findings to inform practice and policy. As a multidisciplinary team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, we had similar experiences to those described by Paltiel et al Here we discuss our efforts to provide technical assistance, aggregate data, conduct analyses, and offer training tools intended to minimize health and educational inequities for children throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
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