How U.S. Public Health Has Strayed From Its Liberal Roots

Feb 13, 2024

The podcast discusses the intersection of politics and public health during the Covid-19 response. It explores the retreat from free speech and open debate in public health. The effectiveness of masks and the challenges of implementing mask mandates are also discussed. The frustration and lack of logic behind certain Covid restrictions, such as beach and playground closures, are highlighted. The podcast also explores the complexities of decision-making in public health, focusing on privilege and discrimination. The concept of choice architecture and the false choice between diversity and excellence are also explored. Finally, the lack of trust in public health experts and implications for future pandemics are discussed.

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Introduction

00:00 • 4min

From Practicing Medicine to Public Health

03:49 • 11min

The Tension Between Collective Action and Individual Freedom

14:22 • 22min

The Effectiveness of Masks and the Challenge of Mandates

36:35 • 2min

The Frustration of COVID Restrictions

39:01 • 25min

Challenges, Privilege, and Discrimination in Public Health

01:04:23 • 11min

Designing Choices for Collective Benefit

01:15:29 • 3min

Diversity and Inclusion vs. Pursuit of Excellence

01:18:24 • 5min

Challenges in Trusting Public Health and Rebuilding for the Future

01:22:55 • 3min

The Covid-19 response was a crucible of politics and public health—a volatile combination that produced predictably bad results. As scientific expertise became entangled with political motivations, the public-health establishment found itself mired in political encampment.

It was, as Sandro Galea argues, a crisis of liberalism: a retreat from the principles of free speech, open debate, and the pursuit of knowledge through reasoned inquiry that should inform the work of public health.

Across fifty essays, Within Reason chronicles how public health became enmeshed in the insidious social trends that accelerated under Covid-19. Galea challenges this intellectual drift towards intolerance and absolutism while showing how similar regressions from reason undermined social progress during earlier eras. Within Reason builds an incisive case for a return to critical, open inquiry as a guiding principle for the future public health we want—and a future we must work to protect.

Dr. Sandro Galea is a physician, epidemiologist, author and the Robert A. Knox Professor at Boston University School of Public Health. He previously held academic and leadership positions at Columbia University, the University of Michigan, and the New York Academy of Medicine. He has published more than 1000 scientific journal articles, 75 chapters, and 24 books, and his research has been featured extensively in current periodicals and newspapers. Galea holds a medical degree from the University of Toronto and graduate degrees from Harvard University and Columbia University. Dr. Galea was named one of Time magazine’s epidemiology innovators and has been listed as one of the “World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds.” He is past chair of the board of the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health and past president of the Society for Epidemiologic Research and of the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Epidemiological Society. He is the author of The Contagion Next Time and Well: What We Need to Talk About When We Talk About Health. His new book is Within Reason: A Liberal Public Health for an Illiberal Time.