Dr. Jennifer Reich

That there's a certain kind of background that overlays the ability to make this your top priority.

What I will say that surprised me the most moving forward was that I did not expect during and after COVID to see such vicious attacks on public health agencies and practitioners.

so that we started to see, as things became more partisan, a real distrust about who provides information, how local communities try to solve problems for their own residents, whether it was mask requirements, whether it was vaccine mandates, but also whether it's things like managing drinking water, that those things became politicized because each individual really felt empowered to make their own decisions.

And those things have been surprising to me

And I think increasing in frequency, not decreasing.

As we look globally, it's worth noting that only three countries in the world experienced an increase in vaccine trust during COVID and since COVID.

So almost every nation has also seen a drop in confidence in the importance of vaccines and the expectation that people should use them to protect all the people in their community.

And so that tells us that there's something larger at work about how we're going to make sense of this going forward and what it means to

to have technologies, but also build systems around the distribution of those health technologies that are going to be trusted and used in ways that are aligned with other community goals.

And I think we're going to have to continue to think of new solutions because every measles death right now is preventable.

And to have seen for the first time in decades, children dying of a preventable disease, that really asks all of us to think harder about what's happening.

We're in a really hard moment right now in terms of who's in the government.

agencies, who's putting out information, and how we have transparency.

I think one of the challenges is that we've had many federal advisory boards over the years, including the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, that are responsible for reviewing all the science on vaccines to make decisions about their safety, but also their efficacy.

On one hand, it's easy to say, like, it's a government agency, so of course they're going to push vaccines.

They're going to always say vaccines are great.

But actually, those bodies have been really significant historically in identifying adverse reactions and identifying rare complications of vaccines and then suggesting that they be taken off the market.

And so that's been a really significant tool.

And those meetings have been public and they've allowed for open comment from the public.

And that kind of transparency has been inadequate, but also really important.