Opinion | When Public Health Loses the Public - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...public-health-trust.html
public health rigidity culture history crisis policy politics pandemic
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“Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time,” Sandro Galea, the dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, looks to his own field to explain the animating forces behind some of those disputes.
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Despite remarkable successes, Galea argues, public health succumbed to a disturbing strain of illiberalism during the pandemic. This not only worsened the impact of the pandemic; it also destabilized public health institutions in ways that will serve us poorly when the next crisis comes.
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: If Americans have come to distrust public health advice, what role may public health officials have played in fostering that distrust?
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American health experts advocated almost universal child vaccination; meanwhile, in Europe, experts cautioned against vaccinating young children, who were at low risk for serious illness, without more long-term data. “Were we pushing to vaccinate children for their sake or for ours?” Galea asks. “Were we doing it to support health or to make a political point?”
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Scientists should have made more nuanced risk assessments and revisited them regularly. They should have taken into account the consequences and the disproportionate impact of strict lockdowns on lower-income workers and at-risk youth
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This zero-sum mode of thinking — neglecting to take into account one’s own biases, succumbing to groupthink, operating according to the expectations of one’s “side,” discouraging good-faith debate — persisted even as the pandemic eased.
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this tendency to view “core issues in Manichaean terms, with certain positions seen as on the side of good and others on the side of evil, with little gray area between,” as Galea puts it, has continued to inform public health postpandemic
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It also undermines public faith in science, one of the few institutions that had maintained a high level of trust into the Trump era.
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the percentage of Americans who believe science has a mostly positive effect on society dropped to 57 percent in 2023, from 67 percent in 2016. Those who say they have a great deal of confidence in scientists dropped to 23 percent, from 39 percent in 2020. And these declines took place among both Republicans and Democrats.