2. Who makes the hard decisions in public health?

And the need to make hard decisions in public health didn’t just go away. It got pushed down in the system, onto local health officers. They had little social status and were thus highly vulnerable, but they also had little choice, if they hoped to save lives. Local health officers across the country paid with their jobs and more in their attempts to control a disease without the help of the Centers for Disease Control.

I will share a particular experience of one of the vulnerable local health officers from Tennessee who was fired for doing her job.