According to Forbes, the current focus on vaccines in public health discussions creates a dangerous reduction of a complex field to a single, politically-charged issue. The author, a former Epidemic Intelligence Service officer at the CDC, emphasizes that public health encompasses everything from clean tap water and sewage systems to smoking bans and seatbelt laws that save thousands of lives annually. The article highlights how functional public health systems become invisible to the public, much like routine airline safety checks, while failures make headline news. This imbalance has led to eroding trust, with HHS removing essential public health employees only to rehire them after realizing systems wouldn’t function without their expertise, alongside anti-science legislation appearing across the country. This narrow focus threatens to undermine the broader public health infrastructure that protects communities daily.
Table of Contents
The Infrastructure We Forget
What makes public health so challenging to champion is that its greatest successes are precisely what make it invisible. When systems work optimally, we don’t notice the complex network of regulations, inspections, monitoring, and response protocols that prevent outbreaks and environmental hazards. The clean water flowing from our taps represents decades of infrastructure investment, water treatment standards, and continuous monitoring that we completely take for granted until something goes wrong. This invisibility creates a fundamental marketing problem for public health institutions—their best work goes unnoticed while their controversies dominate public discourse.
The Trust Paradox
The current erosion of trust in institutions like the CDC represents a dangerous paradox. We expect perfection from public health while accepting routine failures in other essential systems. Flights get delayed, power outages occur, and internet services fail—yet we don’t broadly question the fundamental value of air travel, electricity, or connectivity. Public health faces the unique burden of being judged by its most visible failures rather than its countless invisible successes. This creates a vulnerability where political actors can exploit single issues like vaccine debates to undermine entire systems that protect population health.
Legislative Backlash and Long-Term Consequences
The wave of anti-science legislation hitting statehouses represents more than political posturing—it threatens to dismantle protections built over generations. These legislative efforts often target specific hot-button issues but contain provisions that could weaken broader public health authority, from food safety inspections to water quality monitoring. The removal and subsequent rehiring of EIS officers demonstrates how quickly essential expertise can be lost and how difficult it is to rebuild. Unlike private sector services that can scale up and down with demand, public health infrastructure requires consistent investment and institutional memory to function effectively during crises.
Beyond the Political Spectrum
What’s particularly concerning is how public health has become entangled in broader political polarization. Historically, smoking bans and seatbelt laws faced opposition but eventually gained broad bipartisan support as their benefits became undeniable. Today, public health measures are increasingly viewed through partisan lenses, making it difficult to have evidence-based discussions about community protection. This polarization threatens to turn what should be technical decisions about population health into ideological battlegrounds, potentially reversing decades of progress in areas completely unrelated to vaccine debates.
The Path Forward
Rebuilding public trust requires making the invisible visible again. Public health institutions need to better communicate their daily successes in preventing foodborne illnesses, maintaining water safety, and monitoring environmental hazards. They must also acknowledge past mistakes transparently while contextualizing them within their broader mission. Most importantly, we need to reframe public health not as a controversial political topic but as the essential infrastructure that it is—as fundamental to modern life as transportation networks or utilities. The professionals working in these systems represent independent expertise grounded in science, not political allegiance, and their work protects everyone regardless of ideology or belief system.
