Public Health In A Post-Evidence World

The Most Important Question · Mar 16, 2026 · 52m

Just because we're done caring about an outbreak doesn't mean the outbreak is done with us.

Over the last year, we have watched something unsettling happen in plain sight. The quiet, active dismantling of the systems built to catch outbreaks early, coordinate a response, and keep hospitals and communities from getting overwhelmed.

Websites have been scrubbed, teams have been hollowed out. Early warning signals have gone silent, and at the exact same time, diseases that many of us haven't thought about since childhood, like measles, are being let back into the present, which really leaves a…