During the pandemic, our public health community was forced to address an unprecedented number of controversies– from extended lockdowns and school closures to mask mandates and nursing home directives.
The public discussion was often minute and technical, with cable channels offering 24 hours of rapidly evolving medical “facts,” theories, and hunches proffered by a gaggle of doctors, scientists, and public health professionals. Conventional wisdom holds that, ‘When you are sick, do not google your symptoms’. Yet the televised version of symptom googling was broadcasted into our living rooms nightly, for the better part of two years.
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The medical crisis, combined with outdated laws, policymakers’ desire to follow the best science, and scientists being thrust into positions of public leadership resulted in some demonstrably counterproductive public policy, such as our collective approach to lockdowns.
Now that we are returning to political and social normalcy, we must recognize how we succumbed to an unseemly creeping authoritarianism during the pandemic. Public health experts became celebrities and political influencers. We became accustomed to hanging on the every word of once-unseen health experts. Soon the pandemic response became more about particular scientists than the science.
