We often talk about how challenging the Covid-19 year has been for so many people. And yet when we look beyond the individual sorrows and losses, the Covid-19 moment has been good for public health as a discipline generally, and for some of its fields specifically. Public health has had visibility like never before, its central concerns in the headlines for more than a year. Prospective students are applying to public health programs in record numbers. Epidemiologists have been declared “the new rock stars” by The New York Times and reporters fill columns asking epidemiologists what they’re personally doing, for example, on Thanksgiving and other holidays, holding the discipline up as a bellwether of data-informed good sense.
We are delighted with this attention. Public health has long been overlooked in the public conversation, and having more graduate interest in the profession is long overdue. It is likely that there will be more public health jobs created post-pandemic than ever before, establishing a moment of opportunity for us to welcome a new generation to the field that will lead in decades to come.
It is, of course, also true that this heady moment holds peril in that we risk overstating what we know and the confidence with which we know it, to the detriment of the world and our own field and reputation. We have no particular desire to be skunks at the public health garden party. But it does seem to us worth reflecting on the main challenges that public health faces in this moment that suggest a need for a thoughtful pause.
Read the full post on The Turning Point.