Upward and Onward: 2025 Preparedness Summit
The first was highlighted by Dr. Tom Frieden in his remarks for one of the summit’s plenary sessions. Dr. Frieden, who is a former CDC director and also former commissioner for the New York City department of health, first vocalized his understanding that public health is facing hard times. He acknowledged that what is currently happening, be it to preparedness, public health, or public service, is not normal. And yet, he said, public health has overcome challenges before and will continue to overcome them now. Most importantly, Dr. Frieden called out public health preparedness as a “science.” He was referring to not just the field’s constant endeavor to employ evidence-based practices, which was also clear from each and every one of the sessions I attended, but also because the field always “want to be better today than yesterday.” I was particularly struck by this comment on a personal level.
Public health preparedness in the United States has always had to learn on its feet. It was abruptly brought into the spotlight by the 2001 anthrax attacks and given a national security imperative. The workforce covers a large and complex mission set, with a variety of backgrounds and cultures that have learned to work together every day with a common mission. The field has, by necessity, applied any lessons learned from each exercise and incident as quickly as it could, even when it has felt that it did not have the resources or hands that it needs.
The second theme has to do with an area that needs some extra love and care in order to recover: the bonds and trust that we have with each other. As Dr. Frieden stated plainly, “the one thing you cannot surge is trust.” He emphasized that you can only build trust by delivering on things that matter to people and letting them feel that they are heard.
This applies to everything from public health agencies’ relationships with their constituents to public health’s relationship to its emergency management and law enforcement partners to staff’s relationships with each other.
I know that public health instinctively has known this principle for years, although it has come back into focus even more acutely during the past several years as communities across the globe faced COVID-19, Mpox, RSV, and other outbreaks all at once. And from both my past work and my conversations at the summit with public health preparedness staff from everywhere from Florida to Pennsylvania to Nevada, I have heard how community-level engagements, including productive disagreements, continue to drive preparedness efforts across the country every day.
And finally, remarks by Dr. Eric McNulty from Harvard’s National Preparedness Leadership Initiative hit the nail on the head for the third theme. Dr. McNulty stated that, in past crises, not just COVID-19, “it was not just communities that needed to heal, but also all of us.”
I could not agree more. As I listened to sessions, spoke with the research poster presenters, and reconnected with my old colleagues, I felt like I heard some unspoken subtext: recovery is not just for public health’s constituents, but also for public health itself. This feels even more necessary and true given the recent attack at CDC headquarters in Atlanta, as it may often feel like the discourse in national level news pits a monolithic public against the public health workforce. Shootings like that one most likely exacerbate the feeling that the public health mission is basically Sisyphus’s rock, and I personally hope that as a nation, we can ensure that public health workers are empowered and sufficiently protected. In parallel, I also strongly believe that in the face of this adversity, we will still see public health’s superpower come into play.
This field is filled with individuals who are driven by an unshakeable commitment to their communities and their nation, regardless of the environment. It stems, often, from them being members of those communities themselves – with the same schools, the same grocery stores, the same favorite restaurants and public parks. It is a combination of their professional expertise with their personal humanity that pushes this field forward.
Furthermore, for all of the fear and negativity, I have met plenty of Americans with gratitude for public health’s work each day. I hope that the public health workforce of today, and current students who will join the workforce of tomorrow, will not forget this as they move through their journeys to recovery. Our country very much needs what public health provides; the field must continue to find ways to heal together and thrive in the future.
It will by no means be a simple or easy road, but I believe my public health preparedness colleagues’ adamant desire and mindset to serve their constituents is what brings them back to their work and keep attending Prep Summit, year after year. It seems like, deep down, they never truly give up on their belief that there is a way to reach the light at the end of the tunnel and serve their communities in the process.
I also would like to thank GMU’s Biodefense program for the opportunity to attend the summit again. I always treasure the chance to reconnect with my old colleagues and be in-person for programming that warmly highlights public health’s humanity while also calling on the workforce to think about how it can continue moving forward.
Kimberly (Kimmy) Ma is a PhD student in the Biodefense Graduate Program at George Mason’s Schar School of Policy and Government and serves as a Policy Advisor with the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology. This article is published courtesy of the Pandora Report. This article reflects the views of the author alone and does not reflect the view or positions of any organization with which she may be affiliated.
