When the covid pandemic broke out in 2020 the public health system in the US was at a low point: underfunded, fragmented, and politically weak, kicked to the curb by its overbearing cousin, clinical medicine. It was not always so, notes Ed Yong in a commentary from October of 2021 in the Atlantic. As Yong argues, the slow demise of public health in this country was in part a suicide, a near fatal striving to wrap itself in the mantle of laboratory science as the answer to disease, as opposed to agitating for the reforms needed to create healthy living conditions. Patricia Kullberg reads an excerpt from the article entitled: “How Public Health Took Part in its Own Downfall.”
Crowded tenements in NYC; Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine: Public Domain Photo
- KBOO