When we finally get rid of the dead weight and bring in competent leadership and structures that are fit for purpose, public health and infection control of the 2020s will be chiefly remembered for never having missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

On the other hand, I wish this wasn’t interesting times. Regular boring times would be better.

May we live in interesting times, eh?

This started decades ago with fraudsters like Andrew Wakefield.

It grew slowly. PH grew complacent. Rigor was replaced with “feel good”.

But the real test was the pandemic.

PH backed politics, not science. Expediency, not expertise.

The public saw public health reject science.

Example set.

4. Messaging. Make it unqualified. Clean air is good. Viruses float in the air. Masking is a sign of compassion. Wash hand too. Vaccination is a public service.

5. Ban kids who are not vaccinated from public school and daycares .

Make the air quality sensor data public.

That will allow citizens to monitor the environments of their loved ones and report issues if they spot them.

3. Respirators. Deploy multi-sized boxes of *95 / q100 respirators into all schools. Require them to be available.

Me? I have suggestions for a way out of this mess:

1. Air cleaners and air quality monitoring in all schools, day cares and care facilities.

2. An opt-in nation-wide vaccination registry. Allow anyone who wants in to take a blood test to verify their status and to have their care provider access.

Thanks.

I’m willing to listen.

Clearly the pandemic amplified a lot of this, but the signs were clear well before the pandemic.

School boards and public health offices were NOT ensuring vaccination status in the schools.

I gotta admit that @twpiggott.bsky.social stands out as a voice of reason.

This was normal in Edmonton when I lived there. But Edmonton is so much further north.

Next year I will make my snow tire appointment even earlier.

Yes, and an unwillingness of Public Health officials to step up.

Even prior to the pandemic we could see that it was too easy for parents to lie about their kids’ vaccination status.

There is no real vaccine registry.

And PH officials fell into the anti-vaxxer trap of “vaxx and relax”

Politicians are to blame, too.

Too many Public Health officials were afraid to call out politicians.

Nothing stopped PH officials from saying or (leading by example) "I think N95s are really superior and you should wear them".

Like this.

www.vancouverisawesome.com/coronavirus-...

For those of you in Public Health and Infectious Disease communities who are offended by this, let's turn that around:

If bad engineering led to a plane falling out of the sky or a bridge collapsing or the electrocution of kids in a daycare, I'd call that out, too.

Address failure. Directly.

You had one job.

Just maintain the #measles status that your predecessors had established.

But you couldn't even do that.

This is what failure looks like.

It's time Public Health & the Infectious Disease communities to grow up and accept that they need help from experts outside their community.

But you refused to ensure vaccination compliance in our school communities.

You transformed public health into "do your own research" and "be kind" even when it was clear that the anti-vaxxers from the 2000's were leveraging internet-based misinformation tools to run laps around you.

You were against respirators.

You were against air cleaners in classrooms and daycares.

You refused to implement #airborne systems during COVID.

You cast aspersions on industrial hygienists, engineers, physicists & experts in PPE and clean air.

You said "vaxx and relax" & crossed your fingers.