Ventilation and Public Health: A Fraught History.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a vigorous public health discussion has arisen over indoor air quality and ventilation. In popular press articles, bestselling books, and the US Environmental Protection Agency's recently announced Clean Air in Buildings Challenge, scholars and policy experts have claimed that improved ventilation systems can lead to better productivity and performance. By reevaluating those claims in light of the history of public health in Great Britain and the United States, we found that better ventilation has frequently been proposed as a cost-effective and nonintrusive means of improving health in institutions experiencing structural and environmental public health problems.