(NYT) – Almost every doctor has a tragic story that sticks with them. For Dr. Suchitra Rao, a pediatrician in Colorado, it was a teenager with a congenital heart defect and a weakened immune system who got a flu vaccine each year. One year, a stretch of medical visits and hospitalizations crowded out that routine care, and the vaccine got missed. The child caught influenza, the virus led to a secondary bacterial infection, and he died.

This wasn’t a failure of medical discovery; it was a failure of medical delivery. Flu vaccines have been around for many decades. The health care system that shuffled this child from specialist to specialist just never gave the shot. (Read More)