The radical importance of acknowledging progress | The Healthiest Goldfish

I tend to be asked to speak about problems, about challenges to health, and about the steps we can take to fix them. There is always much to talk about. As a society, we face many obstacles to health—from health inequities, to racial injustice, to obesity and gun violence, to climate change. These problems can seem overwhelming, and it is true that solving them is no simple matter. I have written and presented often on these challenges, their scope, and the difficulty of addressing them. A core takeaway of this work is that it will take years of patient engagement to advance the structural changes necessary to shape a world free from the fundamental challenges we face.

But it is also true that we have made tremendous progress in creating a healthier world, to such an extent that, if given the option of being born at any time in human history, most of us would likely choose now. The world is less violent, people are living longer, healthier lives, more children are being educated, poverty has fallen, as has maternal mortality, and living standards have dramatically improved since the start of the Industrial Revolution. These improvements are fundamental to how we now live, and served as the opening chapter of my forthcoming book, The Contagion Next Time. For much of human history, life was a brutal daily struggle for all but the most privileged. While many still live lives of desperate struggle, were someone from the medieval era to travel to the 21st century and see how the world has improved, she would likely feel she had arrived in a different planet.

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Covid-19, Climate, and the Return to "Normal" | The Turning Point

We have no climate vaccine. Covid-19 is our first truly global crisis—changing the way people around the world work and wed, travel and shop, at the same time—but another is coming. And while we expect that we will (mostly) return to the world we knew pre-Covid-19, we should have no such illusion that we can avoid the other challenges that were looming pre-Covid-19. In slow motion, with every day of inaction counting against us, the expense and suffering of Covid-19 escalated; the health effects of climate change will only be worse in due course.

The earth is one degree hotter than it was during the Industrial Revolution. This may not seem like much, but it has been enough to lengthen our fire season and burn 20% of Australia’s forests in one summer, to make our days the hottest in recorded history with worsening crop failures, and to have bleached 90% of the Great Barrier Reef. Climate change has expanded the range and prevalence of some infectious diseases, including Lyme disease and West Nile virus in the US. Deforestation, deleterious for our atmosphere, has brought more wild animals (and zoonotic illness) into contact with humans.

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What do we want from our political system? | The Healthiest Goldfish

It is one of the most-used aphorisms in public health: “[P]olitics [is] nothing but medicine at a larger scale.” That was written by Rudolf Virchow, one of the founders of modern pathology, who also played a key role in the development of social medicine. Virchow became convinced that the underlying reasons for health gaps were social and economic inequities, leading to his participation in the Revolutions of 1848, among other progressive efforts of his time. In articulating a central role for politics in the health conversation, Virchow was, in many respects, decades ahead of his time and led directly to much of the modern discussion about the role that politics plays in shaping health.  

Politics, defined perhaps most easily as the art and science of governance that allows us to live together, unquestionably shapes health. And, in my assessment, we in public health have been—correctly—increasingly vocal about the role that politics plays in shaping health. Perhaps in direct reaction to the Trump administration, which was responsible for a set of policies that were, in the main, detrimental to health, we have had a growing chorus of voices arguing for the importance of thinking about politics when we think about health. There are now dozens of articles on what the new administration can do for health. And given the more visible role of public health in the public arena due to a world-stopping pandemic, it is possible that these voices will have more weight. But as we engage more in urging politics to consider health as part of its core mission, we could also benefit from clarity about what we are trying to achieve through politics. It is too easy to argue against, say, neoliberal ideas which we sense, reflexively, will cause us to underinvest in health—even if I would suggest that the evidence here is not clear at all—but it is harder to think about what we are trying to achieve through our political systems. Perhaps having some clarity on that may help focus our advocacy efforts, as well as the scholarship that can inform how we engage with politics to begin with.

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Time for an Ethics Refresh? | The Turning Point

Imagine it is the year 2025. The Covid-19 pandemic is now a few years behind us with the whole world having been vaccinated successfully. Life is returning to normal, even as global travel has not quite returned to pre-2020 levels.

And then imagine that in January of 2025 news emerges of a novel coronavirus outbreak in Uganda. Within weeks it becomes clear that the new virus, previously not found in humans, is spreading rapidly, and may have a case fatality rate that is higher than that of Covid-19. The world starts bracing for a new pandemic.

Meanwhile, scientists announce that they have, using the widely available viral sequence, created an mRNA vaccine that they believe will be safe in humans, and efficacious. We can have phase 1 and phase 2 safety trials completed by May. A large-scale, phase 3 effectiveness trial, enrolling tens of thousands of volunteers, will deliver results by December 2025.

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Reflecting on the themes of the COVID moment | The Healthiest Goldfish

Because much of the COVID crisis has been about dealing with the pandemic in real time as it has unfolded, there has been little time to reflect on the broader themes of what we have been through. We are now in a moment when we have been living with this challenge for over a year, a year which has taught many lessons about the nature of the virus and the society into which it emerged. It strikes me that this is a good time, then, to look back, to reflect, and to discuss key themes which emerged during the pandemic. That is why last week, in conjunction with National Public Health Week, we hosted a series of Healthiest Goldfish Conversations. At these conversations, we connected (virtually) with readers from across the world, to discuss the issues addressed in this newsletter, and to express a vision for what the pursuit of health could look like in a post-COVID future. Thank you to all who joined us for these conversations; it was a pleasure to connect with you, to learn from your perspectives. At these conversations, certain points emerged, points which have come to define our experience of the pandemic. In today’s essay, I will aim to address these themes, with the goal of informing broader reflections about the overarching narrative of the pandemic.

A quick “housekeeping” note before I do. The many new faces present at these conversations caused me to reflect that it might be worth reintroducing myself to those who have only recently subscribed to The Healthiest Goldfish. I am a physician, epidemiologist, and Dean of the Boston University School of Public Health. I started my career as a doctor, and most of my academic career has been in population health. Much of that has been concerned with a focus on mitigating the factors which generate sickness, moving beyond addressing downstream effects (more on this here). I have since pursued a focus on the social, economic, and political influences that shape health, with an emphasis on trying to inform a scholarship of consequence, to maximize health for the greatest number of people.

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The New Us? | The Turning Point

History teaches that population-wide behavioral patterns change infrequently, and slowly. After all, little changed in how we behaved after the last global disease disruption, the flu pandemic of 1968, and perhaps most dramatically, societal behavioral changes after the 1918 flu pandemic were few and far between. What is most striking about how we act in the future is how similar our behavior looks to what it was like in the past, and that is true whether we have lived through a national trauma or not.

What did change after the 1918 flu pandemic was our appreciation of the need to move beyond considering health as an exclusively individual responsibility, and to set up the structures needed to help promote health collectively. A number of countries created health ministries after the 1918 pandemic and centralized healthcare delivery schemes, which unfolded in different ways in different nations. Russia, for example, was first to follow the 1918 flu pandemic with public healthcare, funded through state-run insurance. The UK, France, and Germany did much the same soon after. In 1922, the League of Nations Health Committee and Health Sections were established—forerunners of the World Health Organization (WHO).

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Fear in a year of pandemic | The Healthiest Goldfish

I am afraid of a lot of things, though probably not more than the average person. I really do not like small closed spaces, and I have a disproportionate fear that any ache and pain can become a terrible illness. I fear economic insolvency. And I have been thinking a fair bit about these fears in the time of a global pandemic. Fundamentally, I have been trying to ask myself: what role does (or should) fear play in our decision-making? How do we reckon with the role fear plays in shaping our choices?

If you live in the US, your odds of being killed by a foreign-born terrorist on American soil are one in 3.64 million. This places risk of death from terrorism far below that of other causes of death, such as, for example, drowning, which is fifth among leading causes of unintentional injury death in the US. Yet drowning risk has not shaped our politics and society for decades, motivated sweeping legislation like The Patriot Act, or helped provide justification for an annual defense budget of roughly $700 billion. This is arguably because drowning, while more widespread, does not receive the same publicity as terror attacks, allowing terrorism to generate a fear disproportionate to the risk it poses. 

Read the full piece on The Healthiest Goldfish.