424 - So You Want to Lead a Public Health Agency?
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 31 January 2022
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Public health leaders are tasked with enormous jobs which have been made even more difficult during the pandemic. Dr. Jay Varma, physician and advisor for former New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio on the pandemic response, returns to the podcast to talk with Dr. Josh Sharfstein about why public health officials have to be subject matter experts, politicians, lawyers, visionaries, and humble public servants, and how aspiring leaders can get the cadre of skills required for success.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 5 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, and a former health commissioner here in Baltimore, Maryland. |
| 0:21.7 | Our goal with this podcast is to bring scientific evidence and experience to shed light on critical |
| 0:27.5 | health issues. If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health |
| 0:33.0 | question at jhhhu.edu. That's public health question at jhhut.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:42.2 | Hi, I'm Lindsay Smith-Rogers, producer of public health on call. Today, the topic is why it's so |
| 0:48.0 | hard to be a health official during the pandemic. Dr. Sharfstein speaks to Dr. J. Varma, |
| 0:53.3 | a professor at Wild Cornell Medical School, |
| 0:56.0 | who advised New York Mayor Bill de Blasio on COVID-19. Let's listen. Dr. Barma, thank you so much |
| 1:02.8 | for coming back to public health on call. I want to ask you a question. Why is being a public |
| 1:09.9 | health director such a hard job? And before you answer, I just |
| 1:14.0 | want to say it's been pretty clear, I think, in the last few weeks, at the national level, |
| 1:20.1 | at the state level, it is enormously complicated to manage through this pandemic. And I'm trying to understand why. |
| 1:30.5 | Yeah. Thank you very much, Josh, for having me. I think, you know, there have been appropriately |
| 1:34.4 | a lot of, you know, good publicity raised about how difficult it is to be a public health leader |
| 1:40.8 | because of the political environment that we're in, because of, you know, |
| 1:44.9 | protests and really large-scale public disagreement about levels of risk tolerance. But I think |
| 1:51.0 | there are some other issues that maybe haven't been addressed quite as much. I worked with |
| 1:56.3 | some of my other colleagues who led the response here in New York City to write an essay about |
| 2:01.3 | kind of leadership challenges. And there are someone that I think that are really unique and |
| 2:05.6 | important for public health officials that are different than being a leader of other organizations. |
| 2:09.7 | I mean, even under the best circumstances, meaning, you know, you have enough time to do your |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.