Actually, (Biden HHS secretary) Xavier Becerra, going toe-to-toe with social media WAS your job. And you were bad at it.
“I can’t go toe to toe with social media,” Becerra said in a wide-ranging interview Wednesday, arguing that even a Cabinet secretary can be hemmed in. As examples, Becerra cited the lawsuits the Biden administration faced after urging social media companies to take down posts the White House considered disinformation. And he noted that officials can’t formally disclose many details about negotiations to lower prescription drug prices. “I don’t get to write whatever I want,” he said. The health secretary never mentioned Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but the longtime anti-vaccine activist’s shadow hung over Becerra’s answers. President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run HHS has relentlessly criticized the agencies he soon may lead, amplified false claims about vaccines and offered alternatives to what he called government misinformation. Now, Kennedy, who has said he is not anti-vaccine, could occupy the office where Becerra was giving his exit interview.
Okay, I hear what he's saying, but here's something I've been saying since the first days of the last plague:
Effective public science education is a core part of the job of public health.
As soon as it became obvious that nobody in public health was doing public communication at all well, I started asking around. There's a first-rate college of Public Health just up the road from me; how many semesters of communication do they require to graduate with a masters degree in public health?
One. At the college sophomore level.
Yikes.
Y'know, my ex-wife was a technical writer, entered the field just as they were switching from hiring male engineers to female english majors, specifically because they found out that it was easier to teach engineering to english graduates than it was to teach engineers how to write coherently.
Public health administrators and staff don't need to be first-rate epidemiologists. They need to know enough about epidemiologists to understand what they're being told by the people in the actual contagious-disease labs and by the statisticians. What they do need to be is first-rate communicators. And they're just not. All the first-rate (and even more of the second-rate) communicators are on the anti-public-health side. May god have mercy on our souls, though mercy merit we none, because as a society we gotta fix this.
