Public health holds many inconvenient truths. Some demand highly technical digging to find the evidence buried in the behavior of living microbes. The vaccines built on that train of evidence interrupt that behavior in ways that are near miraculous, but with variations that infuriate those who want certainty and someone to blame. Bullets lace the CDC encouraged by the lies of our tragic disgrace of a secretary of health, appointed and tolerated by a tragic disgrace of a president.
Most of what public health inconveniently knows is not as subtle as a vaccine, but self-evident. People die in predictable patterns marked by race, gender, language, zip code, religion and what nation they were born in. These patterns not in the genes and not of God, but created and sustained over time and across generations by human choice. Individual behavior makes a difference, of course. Don’t smoke, walk around the block and stop with the sugar. Leviticus had this figured out 3,500 years ago. But neither the Bible nor public health is about about the micro-ethics of individual choice. It is about the choices we make as a people toward patterns of mercy, justice and health for all as God intends.
Public health is the name of that disciplined thought that points out the way, like a honeybee finding its home hive. If you’ve ever actually watched a bee, you’ll notice they don’t actually fly in a straight line. A “bee line” is constant course correction accounting for the wind and drizzle and the fact they don’t see very well beyond 18 inches. Public health is constant course correction, too. That’s what the science is about; it figures things out along the way.
The people who give their lives to this work are poorly paid by the standards of hospital-based healthcare. Nobody in public health has ever earned in two years what many hospital CEO’s make in a month. They don’t have jets, three homes or minions to write their speeches and books. They do science for the same reasons poorly paid pastors do ministry; they love giving their lives to the lives of others beyond themselves.
I have worked among these sacred servants for many years, sometimes blessed to pray with and for them:
“What both faith and public health view as sacred, blessed, honorable, worthy of praise and sacrifice are the choices that lead to life, protect it, enhance it, extend it and spread its blessings widely across the people. We don’t think God is done; and we don’t think science is done. Thus we love to work together, even when some of us don’t care about God and others don’t care for science.
“Our beloved field of public health can never stop talking about facts, analytics, determinants, vectors, patterns and predictors. This is because of our crazy love for the people–the public.
“We can not stop talking about why we continue to hope for better, hope for more and simply won’t quit hoping no matter what. You can take our money, put us in the dumpiest offices and cut our staff. You can treat us as pitiful, hardly even as honorable as a primary care doctor, which in hospital world is hardly on the map. We won’t quit. Why? Because we are in a lovers quarrel with the public we love.
“This is the time for those who just can’t stop loving the messy, disappointing, ever-muddling gaggle of humans called “the public.” We are in JUST the right work at just the right time. While others rant, we must speak out of that love. Bring our facts and laptops, as we know that science is a friend of humans and what we are possible of.”
God will never waste the life of an honest scientist who brings data to power without apology for its inconvenient demands for mercy and justice. Science is a gift of a loving God for all the people. May God bless and protect those sacrificing today for doing the right thing for the public. Shame on those who persecute them.
// photo credit CNN. And me.
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