How Public Health Found Its Voice

The Trust Equation 

Bartlett decided to meet the mistrust head-on. She co-created the podcast Why Should I Trust You? with two former TV news journalists. The weekly show, which is in the top 1% of Apple’s podcasts and has been featured in major media outlets, invites skeptics into conversation rather than lecturing at them. 

In one memorable episode, vaccine researcher Paul Offit, MD, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, appeared alongside listeners who had previously dismissed him as a pharmaceutical industry “shill.” But by the end of the conversation, those same listeners were asking substantive questions about his research methodology.  

Jessica Malaty Rivera, MS, an infectious disease epidemiologist, discovered an alternative to prescriptive messaging almost by accident. She had switched her private Instagram to public in March 2020 to answer friends’ COVID questions, and within months, she had nearly 500,000 followers hanging on her 15-second responses. 

“I became a human to a lot of these people,” says Rivera, a DrPH student in EHE and a senior science communication adviser at the de Beaumont Foundation. “I’m a young mom, a woman of color. My kids are squawking in the background. They see the same toys spilled on the floor as they do in their homes.” 

Rivera introduced the concept of a “risk budget”—the idea that everyone makes different calculations about acceptable exposure based on their circumstances. 

“I was very transparent about my own family’s choices,” Rivera explains. Her son’s hospitalization with RSV in 2019 shaped her approach. “I said, I have experienced watching my child need oxygen. That is informing my risk tolerance. But I didn’t tell people to do anything. I just said, this is based on the data, these are the decisions I’m making.” 

Caitlin Rivers, PhD, MPH, an associate professor in EHE and a senior scholar at CHS, has similarly centered transparency in her popular weekly newsletter, Force of Infection. For example, when her prediction about the summer 2024 COVID season didn’t play out as expected, she explained why she’d be wrong and then shared her new thinking and the related uncertainties.  

Readers accepted her explanation because they’d come to trust her through consistent weekly contact—the kind of familiarity that allows forgiveness when predictions don’t pan out.