Everyone Back in the Office Day!

It’s not lost on me that today was supposed to be the day that offices were supposed to be full again all over the United States. The Tuesday after Labor Day! We can start hugging again! Let’s go take in a concert, when do work happy hours start again. Instead my work morning starts with me walking into a studio at MPR that is supposed to be empty to do trivia on the Current’s show. Jade (our midday host and music director) is in there working hard thinking that it’s a Monday cause we all know today feels like the most Monday ass Monday in the world even though it is Tuesday. So, she throws on her mask and makes way for me to do trivia and all I can think is. . .it’s still fucking like this? We are still wearing masks, we are still broadcasting from different studios, people still aren’t going in to their offices.

Now here’s a silver lining friends. Maybe right now we are making the right decision by prioritizing schools. It’s more important that schools are open than offices. Hard stop period that’s it no question. So, if we are to choose one, we choose schools. How nervous am I that over 50% of Minnesota schools will be back on distance learning by October 1? I am really nervous. I think that ultimately a lot of individual classrooms will shut down, a lot of people will get sick, but I do think that school will prevail.

If we describe “here” as a place where so many Americans have founded fears of public health and of the medical industry. And if we describe “here” as a place where many Americans consume information that is crafted to radicalize them and to push them away from better choices I want to tell you a little bit of why I think we got here and a lot more about how to get to a better place.

Short run answers for increasing vaccination numbers are hard to come by. My first advice: don’t identify people who haven’t gotten the vaccine as idiots. There are idiots who have gotten the vaccine, and idiots who haven’t. But there are people who primarily make reasonable choices and in my opinion have made the unreasonable choice of forgoing a vaccine that will help their health and the community’s health. My biggest take on vaccine encouragement: if you swing some amount of institutional power. . .push it towards vaccine requirements. I co-own a trivia company, we just added a vaccine mandate. If you run a business, a theater, a community organization. . .if you have an institutional lever to pull to encourage vaccination. . .do it. If you have the plausible opportunity to support people who see obstacles to getting the vaccine and help them get over those do it. If you don’t have that institutional power. . .kill everyone with kindness. Thank people for getting the vaccine, support people who get the vaccine. Don’t dance on the grave of anti-vacc folks who are leaving their family to put together the pieces. Do I find it jarring or somehow poetic when one of these people dies? Perhaps some portion of me does, but a much larger portion thinks about the tremendous load a family will have to bear without a dad, a mom et cetera. I lead with that.

Long run, if our health system was more transparent our vaccine numbers would be better. There’s a lot of people who have a distrust, healthy or otherwise, of the government. Most of those folks still get driver’s licenses, still seek permits for rebuilding projects. Public health needs to be an unimpeachable good that receives wide latitude and high levels of support. It can’t be hollowed out financially, it can’t be rudely paternal towards people. There is also ground to recover. I am tired of folks footnoting on the Tuskegee experiments when discussing vaccine hesitancy. All that footnote does is treat medical racism like a historical relic which is criminally undereducated. Medical inequities and racism can be found yesterday, today and tomorrow. And I see some of the same “thin blue line” nonsense happening in the medical sector as I do in public safety. Call out bad actors, call out bad behaviors, call out bad outcomes. As a chorus of public health officials sound the alarm about the shortcomings of the system that chorus can push us to a different place. But if medical professionals are asking “treat us like an unimpeachably good service and respect us flat out with no regard for our track record” we’re screwed. We’re screwed because I believe it creates a disconnect and a disbelief that no one is willing to brook. And I ultimately believe that it is the institute’s responsibility to share it’s shortcomings, to address those shortcomings and to change the conversation. I don’t believe we can just demand it of individuals who can’t speak as a chorus. But I believe that if some statistically insignificant group of health professionals continued to routinely talk about this, some tides could change.

There’s a moment now where we need the public to trust the health care industry. We can only fix that with persuasion and persistence. There’s a moment coming in the future where we’ll need the public to trust the health care industry. We can do that by acknowledging shortcomings, addressing fears, righting wrongs and bringing a new level of discourse to how we talk about public health.