Do you remember a time or the moment when you first learned about public health or thought about public health as a career?

Yeah, you know, interestingly, I never really thought of public health as a career.

I sort of knew about public health from medical school.

Many of my colleagues in University of Illinois were getting MPHs because they saw the MPH as kind of the MBA for medicine.

They saw that as rounding out their professional expertise.

Because if you think about it, public health is a five core competency that you just didn't get a lot of in medical school training, health administration, believe it or not, statistics, epidemiology, mental health.

was unless you're going to go into psychiatry or behavioral health, that wasn't really emphasized a lot in most people's medical school training.

How have we been winning in this last year? You can pick whichever one you want to start with.

Now, when I think of military medicine, to me, it seems like, isn't it always a goddamn emergency?

What's left? No, military medical training programs are no different than the civilian.

You see military members and their families, and they have heart attacks and asthma, and they need high blood pressure taken care of.

So no, my training was no different than anybody else, except The fact that when the military regionalizes stuff, that means that you take care of everybody who needs specialty care in that region.

So just to give you an example, if you're a specialist in gastroenterology, One of the things that you learn to do is a procedure called endoscopy, where you take a tube and you go through the mouth into the stomach to look at the stomach.

If you have a bleed or any kind of tumor or anything like that, that's usually reserved for people who are specialists in gastroenterology.

Now, as a resident, you do get to do a few of those procedures because they want you to learn to do the procedure as an internal medicine resident.

We agree.

Is this gonna get worse before it gets better?

It's gonna get worse before it gets better.

And what the problem is what used to happen is you would have someone from out of the country who would come in, um, and they would go into a community that was under-vaccinated or unvaccinated.

And, um, and then of course the outbreak would, would develop there.

And, and then you would spend hours because what a health department officer has to do is they have to go and chase every single case, um, just like Sherlock Holmes.

They've gotta chase every person who was exposed to the disease.

They gotta take a, a history.

A lot of people say, I hear a lot of parents say, "I, I, I'm not against the vaccines, I just don't want them, uh, all at once," or, "I'd like to spread them out," or, "My pediatrician wants to give them all at once and I, I, I think, uh, they should be spread out." What do you say to somebody who, who, who asks about that?

And Dr. Benjamin, from your vantage point, what are these factors like housing instability and food insecurity and, and the economy, how are they affecting people's physical health?

You know, Kim, I think the big issue here is the fact that people have never really had any rest.

When people go into combat in the military, we take them out of circulation so they can get what we call crew rest.

When I used to run the EMS system here in Washington, DC, we would put our EMS workers and our firefighters, giving them some downtime.

Well, the population in our country has not had any downtime.

For the last twenty years, we've had a pandemic, we've had economic disruptions, at least two of them.

We've had social unrest, we have political polarization, and what's happening right now, it's on steroids.

Is, is this the new normal, or is there some light at the end of the tunnel?

How do we talk about prevention in a way that really connects with communities today?

We often talk about the fact that we're talking about prevention, but I'm not quite sure that we are really selling prevention as the best buy that it is in the best way possible.

First of all, of course, when we do our best work, nothing happens, or the less severe things happen.

And if you think about what we did during COVID, for a variety of reasons, we were counting ER visits, hospitalizations, and deaths.

when we probably should have been talking about lives saved, lives improved, number of people vaccinated, and helping people connect the dots to our prevention efforts versus, frankly, being on the frightening side of the equation, which they were already afraid of the disease.

Now, it was important for us to tell people what we knew and what we didn't know.

But we often did not celebrate the successes on an ongoing basis, which I think would have been much more hopeful.

When you think about where public health is today, what are some areas where you think we could achieve important wins in the next five to 10 years?

What kind of impact could that have on the work that they do that impacts people who are watching?

Well, this is an example on the part of the secretary of failed leadership and administrative incompetence.

You know, he has created a toxic work environment, um, and then, of course, after them bringing on board a highly competent expert in infectious diseases who told the secretary that his ideas around COVID vaccination, um, were not scientifically valid, he decides he wants to fire her.

... what concerns do you have about what that could mean?

You know, they're pushing out some of the world's top experts in disease: infectious disease, chronic disease, injury, climate disease, environmental health.

They're- they're driving them out of the agency.

And what this means is that, again, um, the air will not be safe to breathe, the water not safe to, to drink, and the food not safe to eat.

We can't assure you of that because the federal oversight of those activities won't be there with the experts that are necessary to get the job done.