THE NEW YORK TIMES – “Put on your masks!”
My son and I were cycling during the pandemic when a passerby furiously screamed that in our direction.
I shouted back something too long about updated recommendations on masking outdoors and was left yelling into the wind, my kid giving me the “Calm down, Mom” look.
We all had our uncalm moments during the pandemic. What rankled me during this one was that the science was on my side. Yet here was someone in my community operating within a completely different framework.
In his new book, “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.
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.
Last summer, Francis Collins, the former head of the National Institutes of Health, admitted that the “public health mind-set” had been too narrowly focused, which he now calls a mistake.
“You attach a zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recovered,” he said …
During the pandemic, states, municipalities, school districts, businesses — sometimes using guidance from public health organizations and sometimes ignoring it — often relied on what felt right as opposed to empirical data …
