Five Years Later: Security in a Post-COVID World
There are moments where life is divided into a before and an after. Something so significant occurs that it permanently alters the way you perceive the world and yourself in it.
For many of us, 11 March 2020 is one of those moments. That’s the day that the World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared COVID-19 a pandemic.
The stock market plunged, U.S. President Donald Trump banned travel from Europe, and the National Basketball Association (NBA) suspended its season until further notice.
At the same time, security practitioners were working around the clock to put in place measures to protect their employees and organizations. Ahead of the fifth anniversary of the pandemic declaration, Security Management spoke with a range of security and health professionals to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic experience shaped them and what it means for the future of risk management and emergency preparedness.
Partnerships are a Priority
Even among enterprises, global aerospace company Boeing is big. It employs more than 170,000 people in 65 countries to provide aerospace services and design and manufacture commercial airplanes, defense products, and space systems for customers in more than 150 countries.
Dave Komendat was the chief security officer at Boeing for 15 years, including during the COVID-19 pandemic. He remembers first discussing the disease at an organizational meeting in January 2020. Soon after that, COVID-19 cases were confirmed in Seattle, Washington, 25 miles south of the Boeing Everett Factory—the world’s largest manufacturing site, which produces the 747, 767, 777, and 787 airplanes.
The company began scaling up its crisis management team, and, since this was a medical emergency, Komendat co-led the effort with Boeing’s chief medical officer, Dr. Laura Cain. There were also representatives from communications, HR, legal, facilities, and the three lines of business on the team.
“Whatever decisions we were ultimately going to have to start making were going to have impacts on the company,” Komendat explains. “Whether it was from a resource perspective, from the way we work perspective, what we communicate internally and externally to our employees, our customers—all of these things had an impact.”
One of the biggest points of concern was what the impact would be to Boeing’s employees.
“You can’t work virtually and build an airplane,” Komendat adds. The need to continue reporting to work naturally created some anxiety, since people were worried about getting sick, spreading the disease to their coworkers, and potentially making their family members sick. “Regardless of whether you were in the workplace or sitting at home, there was a level of anxiety and stress that we were trying to manage and trying to communicate the best information possible to give people a sense of calm.”
A critical component of that communication effort was having an internal medical officer. Boeing began producing emails, webinars, and other communications about COVID-19, leveraging Cain’s ability to communicate in layman’s terms about the disease.
“She had a very calm air about her when she would explain what the different changes coming out of the U.S. government meant, why some of these changes were occurring, and what the impacts could be from a health perspective,” Komendat says. “It was invaluable having her be, in many cases, the spokesperson for what the company was doing in this space. I think it created a sense of calm and confidence with our employee population that there was a medical professional on our team who was helping to guide the decisions that the company was making.”
Regardless of whether you were in the workplace or sitting at home, there was a level of anxiety and stress that we were trying to manage.
Additionally, the partnership with the legal department, the communications team, and facilities personnel was critical, Komendat says. Boeing has operations in different jurisdictions, many of which had vastly different requirements for COVID-19 mitigation measures as the pandemic continued. The legal team could review those requirements and align them with company policies, the communications team could help craft messaging to explain those requirements, and the facilities team worked to make sure those requirements on sanitization and physical distancing were being met so Boeing could remain operational.
“We could not have done what we did without that type of integrated, collaborative, one-Boeing approach,” Komendat says, adding that the company was not unique here. He was communicating regularly with security peers at other companies to learn about their similarly collaborative efforts.
“Benchmarking was occurring between security organizations, between legal organizations, between HR organizations,” he explains. “Quite frankly, there was an information void. One of the things that we learned during this last pandemic is the U.S. government did not necessarily leverage and communicate with industry.”
This effort naturally created a great deal of strain for executives who were responsible for business operations and the life and safety of their employees. From a glass-half-full perspective, Komendat says the experience allowed him to learn a tremendous amount and work with people that he normally did not have an opportunity to.
“Having the opportunity to work with some incredibly smart people and learn what they do and see their talents at play in a crisis situation, that was a real bonding experience,” he says.
For instance, Komendat would spend hours each day on Zoom calls with a core group of eight to nine other employees working on the response effort. He recalls times where he’d even eat dinner while on a call so he could continue conversations with his colleagues.
“A lot of the other stuff that was really not fun, you forget about that part of it, but you remember those people you worked with and how hard you worked together, and made a difference for a period of time—and hopefully saved some lives, too,” he says.
Komendat retired from Boeing in October 2022, in part because he says he was emotionally and physically drained from the pandemic response effort.
“I’m not unique. There are millions of people at every level of working who faced some impact by this,” Komendat adds. “I think being so deeply engaged in it on a daily basis—and a lot of things we had to do were not popular internally. There was conflict.”
For instance, senior leadership might have wanted to move in one direction, but the crisis management team was recommending a different one. Most of the time, executives ultimately supported what the team suggested. But there were times where Komendat says you could feel that there was unhappiness with the decisions being made. This took a toll.
Many of his security peers also left the industry in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and Komendat says he is concerned about the risk of post-pandemic fatigue.
“It’s the last thing people want to talk about. Many of the people that were intimately involved at companies in setting up the response programs are no longer there,” he adds. If another pandemic were to occur in the short term, Komendat says a “tremendous amount” of the COVID-19 pandemic domain expertise would no longer be in the workforce to help steer mitigation efforts.
Komendat also anticipates that there will be less willingness by the business community to take the same steps to mitigate disease spread in the future that were taken during COVID-19.
“I think you’re going to see a lot more pushback and the question: why?” he adds. “That’s again why that relationship between the private sector and public sector becomes so important over the next few years. Without a way of communication, the same thing will happen, except there will be a lot louder voices coming out of industry this time.”
Planning and Communication are Critical
Jeremy Prout, CPP, director of security, Americas, at International SOS, recalls discussing the COVID-19 pandemic in a webinar for ASIS International in February 2020. At the time, he was one of the chairs of the association’s Global Terrorism, Political Instability, and International Crime Community, which has since transitioned to the Extremism and Political Instability Community (EPIC).
“We were trying to figure stuff out with the information we had, and there were a lot of questions,” he says. “A lot of the answers that you got didn’t end up coming out right.”
The crux of the issue quickly became clear, though: understanding planning and crisis management infrastructure.
“Organizations need to have plans for things that can plausibly happen—pandemics can happen,” he adds.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, he says having a strong crisis and incident management structure in place was critical to an effective response. At International SOS, for instance, they had a team that already met quarterly and completed an annual exercise. Having this group in place built a foundation where the organization was prepared to respond to an incident when it occurred—instead of standing up a team after the fact.
“Planning empowers everything else,” Prout says. “Planning doesn’t mean that you have an exact plan for A through H. The purpose of plans isn’t really to follow them, but to generally know what to do when something happens.”
The purpose of plans isn’t really to follow them, but to generally know what to do when something happens.
Having this framework in place, and the thought process that went with it, is also important during a medical emergency since the situation is rapidly evolving and reliable information might be difficult to come by. International SOS has a medical team that is stationed around the world, which helped provide information during the COVID-19 pandemic. But assessing that information and using it to make a good decision was still a process.
“It’s really important that security is able to come out and digest information and communicate to the organization—‘these are the things we do know, here’s where we got it from, and this is why we’re doing it,’” Prout says. “This is simple, but it’s not easy. It takes a lot of work to be able to do that.”
And while artificial intelligence (AI) is getting a lot of attention for its potential to help with this process, it’s not the end-all-be-all given society’s distrust around legacy media, the government, and institutions, he adds.
“It means that you need to be fast, but you also need to be right,” Prout says. “That’s the key point. It’s really critical that we build trust with people, especially in the United States.”
He likens it to pushback post-COVID, where people mistrust the government, so security professionals need to be cognizant that bad information travels fast. They also need to work to build relationships before the next incident, whether it be an outbreak or natural disaster, happens.
“We don’t make friends in a crisis—we do a bit, but only if [the crisis] goes long enough,” Prout jokes. “We want to have those connections beforehand. Let’s talk to our people regularly, beforehand; we don’t want to be security professionals who just show up when things go bad.”
Duty of Care is Different Now
Before COVID-19, there was the 2015 Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Dale Buckner, CEO of Global Guardian, remembers the response to this particular public health emergency because his firm was trying to get oil and gas clients—along with a few government agency personnel—who were positive for Ebola back to the United States.
The company worked to get U.S. State Department approval to conduct a medical evacuation where the clients could be quarantined during the flight. It was an unnerving experience but one that fell under their organizations’ duty of care, Buckner says.
As he sees it, duty of care requires organizations to provide care for their employees in response to medical emergencies, natural disasters, conflicts, kidnap or ransom, or terrorist attack.
Before 2020, Buckner says many companies took a preventative approach to duty-of-care instead of a problem-solving approach. For instance, issuing a pre-travel briefing to an employee traveling to Beijing, China, or Bogota, Colombia, so he or she understands the potential risks of the trip.
Those same employees would then be given access to smartphone applications that would alert them to threats in their area, enhancing their situational awareness while traveling. And the most likely duty-of-care response by the organization would be arranging care for an employee who has a medical emergency—such as a heart attack or illness—while traveling.
“Post-COVID, the world has completely changed,” Buckner says. As of early March 2025, “there are 56 conflicts around the world with 92 countries participating in them. It is the most conflict the world has seen since World War II.”
This now means that the preventative approach to duty of care is no longer enough. It now requires a physical response for when an incident or emergency occurs.
“No longer is the probability of medical going to be more than the probability of a physical security issue,” Buckner adds. “That’s what’s really changed in this post-COVID world. The definition of duty of care, going back to the word ‘care,’ now requires more physical or kinetic responses. No longer is it just pre-travel intel and an app alert and focused on medical.”
At the beginning of 2020, Global Guardian analysts knew COVID-19 was spreading outside of China, primarily by commercial air travel. As confirmed case numbers ticked up, Buckner says they started to think about what the outbreaks meant for their clients.
Then in March 2020, shutdowns started to happen. Commercial fights were grounded, corporate headquarters closed, government officials announced lockdown orders, and Buckner adds that “at that point, everyone knew this is a black swan event and it’s going to change the world. And it did.”
Global Guardian, which is headquartered in Virginia outside of Washington, D.C., responded by following its emergency response protocols. All employees went home for seven days, and the company pushed out its systems to be Web-based, so work could continue remotely.
After that initial week, the company brought its ops center team back to the office. It spread staff members out, required everyone to wear masks, and distributed Lysol and hand sanitizer across the space. Buckner also returned to the office, coming in to support his team every day.
This in-person, collaborative team was needed because the company was working to conduct mass evacuations of clients around the world, including in Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, Morocco, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. They moved thousands of Americans and Europeans back to their home countries.
Then came the requests for medical evacuations—clients who were sick, most likely with COVID-19, in one country and wanted to return to the United Arab Emirates, the United States, and Western Europe for medical care. Many of these requests began to come in from clients in India, where the health system was collapsing due to the major influx of COVID-19 positive patients.
“The hospitals were overwhelmed—they ran out of medicine,” Buckner says. The biggest concern was liquid oxygen, which was supplied from China to India but disrupted because the personnel responsible for bringing those supplies into the country were getting sick.
That’s what’s really changed in this post-COVID world. The definition of duty of care, going back to the word ‘care,’ now requires more physical or kinetic responses.
The company began to do initial evacuations of six to eight patients at a time, ultimately moving up to 26 patients. Sick individuals were placed in the rear of a plane, 30 rows of seats were left empty, and then non-sick patients were placed in the front of the plane for evacuation.
But the firm also took the unusual step of standing up personnel to assist clients who could not leave India. Buckner explains that they created hotlines for clients to speak directly with physicians in India, a requirement for anyone needing a prescription, and provided 48 medical staff on the ground. Global Guardian also transitioned its car and driver services that were in place in the country to bring supplies to clients who needed to quarantine at home, such as food, COVID-19 testing kits, and oxygen.
“That model of going to people—basically turning our car, driver, and executive protection services into Uber medical if you will—directly to your home was the best system and the best outcome we could have provided,” Buckner says.
The firm was able to provide these services because it has personnel stationed in 141 countries that can spring into action when a crisis is developing; it doesn’t follow the model of sending in team members after an incident occurs. This was a great asset, Buckner adds, when supply chains were stressed and organizations were struggling to obtain PPE.
“When people couldn’t get masks, when people couldn’t get rubber gloves, when people couldn’t get COVID testing kits, we could because all we had to do was call our partners in Malaysia, call our partners in China, and our teams on the ground would say, ‘Listen, we know that you’re working. We’ll come to the warehouse, we’ll pick it up, we’ll bring the trucks, we’ll load it, and we’ll put it on the airplane,’” Buckner explains. “That ability to create a private supply chain for gloves, masks, testing kits, Lysol, so on and so forth, allowed us to move faster…to get access to supply chains that were overstressed and overburdened when everyone was rushing for it, primarily in China.”
Five years after the pandemic began, new emergencies and crises continue to emerge—from earthquakes to terror attacks to wildfires to the outbreak of war. The pace of the disruption has informed the firm as a business and changed the expectation of what duty of care means post-COVID.
“The only answer is a physical human-to-human contact to go check on people and then get them out of there if need be, or provide services,” Buckner adds.
Public Health is Political
Dr. Scott Rivkees was working in a research lab at the New Jersey Medical School when he was galvanized to pursue a career in medicine—specifically pediatrics. He went on to complete his residency, fellowship, and postdoctoral training, afterwards serving on the faculty at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
His career journey later took him to Florida, where he served as the state surgeon general and secretary of health from June 2019 to September 2021. The Florida Department of Health, which Rivkees was responsible for, is the largest centralized department of health in the United States, serving 67 counties and nearly 22 million residents. At that time, the department boasted close connections with hospital systems in the state while also overseeing nursing homes and assisted living facilities.
Florida “probably has some of the most vulnerable medical populations in the country by nature of the age of the population,” Rivkees adds, referencing the nearly 4.6 million people who live in the state and are older than 65.
As a centralized system, each Florida county’s public health officer reported up to Rivkees’s office and worked in a collaborative manner. This allowed the state to push out health information and implement actions at a broad level.
One of the first challenges Rivkees dealt with when he took on the surgeon general role in 2019 was a serious hepatitis A outbreak. More than 40 people in Florida had died from the disease, and it posed an immediate infectious threat to the population. Rivkees worked with others to stand up an incident management team (IMT), a formal structure in public health for addressing certain types of outbreaks.
“Working on that, we were actually able to put a team in place that had a significant impact,” he says. “That team ended up becoming very instrumental when COVID first appeared in the state of Florida, to allow us to be able to mobilize resources and mobilize a consolidated approach in terms of dealing with COVID early on.”
Shortly after New Year’s Day in 2020, Rivkees says he received a cryptic note from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It said that there were 44 cases of a serious respiratory illness in Wuhan, China, and to stay tuned for additional information. This was the first note of its kind that Rivkees had received during his time as the surgeon general. He immediately knew that something serious was going on.
That premonition would be correct. Within the next week, researches sequenced the virus to determine it was a novel coronavirus (COVID-19), the World Health Organization (WHO) released a test for the virus, and China took drastic measures to isolate individuals to reduce the spread while also building field hospitals to host thousands of patients. On 17 January, Rivkees attended his first briefing with the CDC to find out what was coming.
Florida’s response measures really ramped up at that point, especially protections to protect older individuals who were most at risk for complications and death from COVID-19. Rivkees explains that the department issued visitor restrictions for nursing homes and assisted living facilities, measures that helped keep the mortality rate in Florida lower until the Delta wave of COVID-19 hit in 2021.
“For a state that was among the most medically vulnerable in the country, our mortality was 28th or 29th per capita, reflecting the very aggressive measures we put in place to protect individuals who were older,” Rivkees says.
Florida also increased personnel to conduct contact tracing, recruiting individuals from the schools of public health across the state to add to the size of its existing workforce, and the capacity of labs to run tests of COVID-19 samples. The state also created a public reporting system which showed the county level and zip code where COVID-19 cases were confirmed, so the public could see how the disease was spreading.
Communication with stakeholders—especially the community—proved to be a valuable tool in pandemic response. Rivkees’s team held weekly calls with the Florida Hospital Association to talk about what was happening, concerns, and needs from healthcare facilities in the state. They took a similar approach to nursing home and assisted living facilities communication, and even the business sector.
Rivkees remembers a call with the Florida Chamber of Commerce in late March or early April 2020 where they discussed the need for businesses to improve their ventilation to limit the spread of the respiratory virus.
Hospitals in Florida, like many other organizations, also struggled with supply chain challenges. Most healthcare facilities have reserves of masks, gloves, and other personal protective equipment (PPE), but the COVID-19 response was unprecedented, and many moved through their stores rapidly while awaiting new shipments—often delayed because of port closures, delayed ships, and other issues in China where the materials were mainly produced.
Rivkees says his office worked to push out PPE—including more than 100 million masks—and redistribute protective materials to healthcare facilities around the state.
“There was a free-for-all among different states; states were competing with each other, with different vendors, trying to get PPE,” he adds. “It really set up a really unhealthy competition among different states as to who could get what.”
There was a free-for-all among different states; states were competing with each other, with different vendors, trying to get PPE.
Alongside PPE challenges, healthcare also practitioners also struggled with burnout during the COVID-19 response. More than 100,000 registered nurses left the workforce and more than 230,000 physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and other clinicians also quit their jobs as of data collected in August 2021. Rivkees says Florida responded by working with vendors who could add personnel to augment the public health and hospital workforce.
Up until March 2021, Rivkees says that Florida took a number of steps that helped limit the spread of COVID-19 and keep the public safe. For instance, it went beyond the CDC recommendations for vaccinations and implemented a policy to allow individuals 65 and older to be vaccinated in the initial vaccine release—instead of just those 75 and up.
“By the time March or April of 2021 happened, we had among the highest proportion of the most medically at-risk people in the country—65-plus—vaccinated,” Rivkees says. “This is one of the reasons why our mortality rate was much lower than you would expect.”
For the first year of the pandemic, governors across the political spectrum equally promoted COVID-19 vaccination and mitigation measures. But lockdowns, restrictions on indoor activities, and safer-at-home orders across the country were taking a toll on the public. The national unemployment rate hit 22 percent, children weren’t attending school in person, and there was pushback from the business community to elected officials to resume business as usual, who then pushed back against CDC guidance for stopping the spread of COVID-19. Political tensions then made the situation more polarized.
“President Trump, at that time, ended up literally asking members of certain states to rebel against their governors who had lockdown orders,” Rivkees says. “…with him being such a strong political figure, these types of things were adopted by other elected officials.”
Trump lost his re-bid for the presidency in 2020 and left office in January 2021, just over a month after COVID-19 vaccines were approved by the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA). Three former U.S. presidents—Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—and then U.S. President Joe Biden appeared in a public service campaign shortly afterwards, urging people to get vaccinated. Trump, however, did not appear in the video, and after its release there was a dramatic shift in politicization of the COVID-19 response.
“Coming after a very contentious political election, that’s all it took for red state governors to stop promoting vaccines,” Rivkees adds.
This included Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, who stopped speaking about the merits of vaccination—one of the most effective disease mitigation measures. DeSantis also began drifting away from promoting other mitigation measures, including masks, social distancing, and closures. Although the governor took that public approach to COVID-19 mitigation, Rivkees says DeSantis continued to provide financial support to Florida’s Department of Emergency Management and Department of Health to proceed with their core activities to control the disease.
But government officials, celebrities, influencers, and others continued their attacks on public health experts. They promoted sham medications to treat COVID-19, such as ivermectin, and tried to discredit experts.
“When the medical community pushed back against these things, it led to experts being discredited and the adoption of almost a parallel response universe for COVID-19,” Rivkees says. “This contributed to a big split in terms of how people viewed the COVID-19 response, which correlated with who they had voted for.”
When the Delta wave of COVID-19 hit, it took a severe toll on more conservative counties where people were less likely to be vaccinated. Florida went from having one of the lowest mortality rates in the country to being in the top 10, which Rivkees attributes to the lack of vaccine promotion at the political level.
Rivkees says this was the first time he’d seen a public health response become this politicized. Both Bush and Obama, for instance, oversaw epidemic response (for H1N1 and Ebola, respectively) and allowed public health officials to take the lead, following their guidance.
“Then during this pandemic, you had a coronavirus task force of experts in the field dealing with not exact information at the time, but they were the ones trying to give recommendations,” Rivkees says. “Because some of these recommendations didn’t jive with a certain political agenda—keep the economy open, keep schools open, false premises that it’s better to let COVID-19 spread through the younger population to get herd immunity—we ended up seeing real parallel messaging take place. The messaging ended up coming from elected officials, largely as the expert was being discredited.”
This now means that we are in a much worse position to deal with a pandemic because the public does not know who to listen to, Rivkees adds.
“The public no longer listens to the experts in the field,” he explains. “We’ve seen the rise of non-mainstream individuals who make recommendations that are not accurate but are followed, amplified by the megaphone of social media, which is how a lot of people now will get their information and make decisions.”
Rebuilding trust in public health officials will require some reflection from politicians and some assessments about what went wrong, Rivkees adds. He likens it to the commission that was created in the wake of 9/11 to assess failures in the security apparatus that allowed the hijackers to succeed and kill 2,996 people. More than 1.2 million people have died from COVID-19 in the United States, as of early March 2025, yet the only U.S. state to create a commission to assess pandemic response is Indiana, Rivkees says.
“In terms of where we are now, five years coming out of the pandemic, one of the sad things is that experts in medicine—experts in public health—are no longer respected as they were in the past,” Rivkees adds. “In fact, many of the basic tenets of public health are now not accepted and are outright challenged and refuted by many members of the public.”
Five years coming out of the pandemic, one of the sad things is that how experts in medicine—experts in public health—are no longer respected as they were in the past.
Currently, Rivkees is a professor of practice, acting associate dean of education, and vice chair of health service, policy, and practice in the School of Public Health at Brown University, which also has a Pandemic Center. At the center, they are assessing how to deal with pandemics in democracies.
“In terms of what it’s going to take, it’s going to take individuals from the Democratic and Republican Parties getting together and trying to find some common ground about how we’re going to do things later on,” Rivkees says. “Are we going to allow the public healthcare community to be able to provide guidance, which then the elected officials can encourage their populace to follow?”
The CDC declined to comment on this story.
Trust is Still Tenuous
Dr. Craig Spencer began working in emergency medicine in 2008, treating patients on the frontlines in Africa, Southeast Asia, and the United States.
Spencer was working in the emergency department at Columbia Hospital in New York City when hospital workers began to see a major influx in patients with COVID-19 in mid- and late March 2020.
“It was tough because very early on, we had young people die,” Spencer recalls. “We had to respond in a way that we had never had to before. To have so many really sick people all at the same time was pretty unprecedented.”
At hospitals, doctors and nurses treat people who are very sick every day. But usually, those patients are mixed in with patients who are at the hospital for more routine care—cancer screenings, broken arms, and scheduled surgeries.
“To have it such that nearly every person that you’re seeing is on death’s door, or about to be, that’s something that none of us have seen outside of people who had gone and worked in West Africa during Ebola or worked in other outbreaks, of which there were very few,” Spencer says.
For hospital staffers, it was very mentally challenging to respond to the level of care that people needed while also managing their personal stress and worries about getting sick themselves or spreading the disease to their own families.
“There was just so much uncertainty and lack of clarity around all aspects of our lives,” Spencer says. “At the outset, where we didn’t know if it was going to be a couple of weeks, we didn’t know if it was going to be a couple of months, it was just absolutely horrible.”
Spencer, who was elected to the board of directors for Doctors Without Borders USA in 2019, was very active on social media at the time and was also giving interviews to the press about COVID-19. On X (formally known as Twitter), he would receive hateful messages mixed in with strong support.
“I think there was a lot of trust and support for healthcare providers,” Spencer says. “Even once that got worse, when people were happy to be anonymously bullying via social media, I still found that when I went to work, people were incredibly still supportive.”
Even now, Spencer says that most people continue to trust their own healthcare providers. But there has been a dissolution of trust in public health. There were missteps by public health officials, and miscommunication about whether the public should wear masks to mitigate the spread, and that U.S. government officials downplayed the threat of COVID-19 early on in the pandemic.
“Because the Internet is forever, we have comments from [President Trump] and health leadership basically saying that we have this under control and it’s not that big of an issue, and we need to prioritize the stock market,” Spencer explains.
When people were happy to be anonymously bullying via social media, I still found that when I went to work, people were incredibly still supportive.
This was compounded by an overall issue with communication by public health officials, who sometimes decline to give guidance with certainty because they are waiting on scientific confirmation—something the public does not always understand.
Angry people seized onto these mistakes to “make public health a scapegoat for the decline in trust of many other American institutions outside of politics, and inside of politics,” Spencer says. “As a result, we have a scenario today where public health is remarkably seen as untrustworthy, where dozens of states have laws in place limiting public health powers and preventing public health agencies from doing the work that we need to do.”
A review by Stanford Health Policy, for instance, found that 65 laws adopted in 24 U.S. states from January 2021 to April 2023 imposed “important, substantive restrictions on the things officials can do to combat health emergencies. For example, four states adopted prohibitions on requiring vaccines or proof of vaccination, five prohibited mask mandates, seven limited officials’ ability to close businesses, and 11 restricted the ability to restrict religious gatherings.”
The COVID-19 pandemic was detrimental to trust in public health, but Spencer says that trust—or lack of it—is mirrored in just about every other aspect of our lives.
“If you look at Pew and Gallup surveys going back decades, what has happened with trust in the Supreme Court, trust in Congress, trust in just about every other American institution, it has cratered along the same path as public health has in the same time,” he adds.
With that lack of trust and public health skeptics now in positions of authority, if another pandemic occurs people might be less likely to take the measures they did during COVID-19 to stop the disease from spreading, such as quarantining at home, wearing masks, and closing schools and businesses.
“The likelihood that we are going to accept that at a population level is much lower than it was five years ago,” Spencer says. “But the likelihood that the powers that be at the paramount public health level will put in place those interventions, even if they’re lifesaving, I think is remarkably low.
“That is what concerns me, that even without their ability to understand the pitfalls of their priors, when they’re in these positions of power, and are able to guide the public health establishment, they are going to walk us into potentially disastrous circumstances because of their previous convictions, and their inability—or their ability or their desire to—really just copy-paste from the past onto pandemics of the future,” he adds.
Megan Gates is senior editor at Security Management. Connect with her at [email protected] or on LinkedIn.
