This Thinking Public Health gathering was Friday, Feb. 21, 2025, at Kuehner Court in Weil Hall on the Danforth Campus.
Navigating political divides to promote the health of the public
We are at a pivot point for public health. Although public health has been responsible for extraordinary gains in population health over the past two centuries, it finds itself facing a backlash in public esteem that threatens to undermine work the field has done, and that it can do in coming decades. There are many reasons for this challenge. They include willful disinformation spread by cynical actors who have undermined public health to advance personal gain, the emergence of new technologies that have upended what we previously knew about health communication, and, in the aftermath of COVID-19, public health being seen — fairly or unfairly — as aligning with one political party at the expense of engagement with whole populations.
This poses a tremendous challenge for public health. Compounding this problem, we are grappling with the re-election of a U.S. president who, in a previous term, showed himself to be in disagreement with some of the aims of public health and whose recent actions suggest a reprise, perhaps even more so, of his first term. This should be a “mirror-to-self” moment that requires all of us in public health to take a long, hard look at ourselves and ask: How can we reimagine how we think, talk, and act, to position the field to improve the health of all of the public in deeply divided times? The following five readings might be helpful to ground the discussion.
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/epdf/10.2105/AJPH.90.5.702
https://www.drvinayprasad.com/p/nature-the-science-journal-endorsed?utm_source=publication-search
https://sandrogalea.substack.com/p/the-political-decision-that-health
https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/0817945822_59.pdf
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/opinion/covid-vaccine-republicans/html