My guest today, Charity Dean, is a physician in leading voice in the field of public health.

If policymakers had taken her early warnings about COVID-19 seriously, hundreds of thousands

of lives would have been saved.

She's one of the heroes in Michael Lewis's book on the pandemic called the Premonition,

but her work on COVID is just the tip of the iceberg.

The first thing I did in the morning when I would wake up is I would check my work phone

email to see if I had any reports back from this state on the molecular mutations of my

new tuberculosis cases.

That was the most exciting moment of the day.

Welcome to People I Mostly Admire with Steve Levin.

Being completely honest, without really knowing all that much about it, I've always had

a really low opinion of the field of public health.

It feels to me like there's a lack of rigor in what they do, quasi science that tries

to get passed off as real science.

I'd really like to be wrong about that, and I'm hoping that Charity Dean will change

my opinion today.

So Charity, I've heard it said about you that when you were young and feeling kind of blue,

you chewed yourself up by reading books about the bubonic plague, is that really true?

Yes, in fact, it's still true today.

The other day, I was trying to recall a number of obscure examples of a reverse cordon

sanitaire.

And so once again, I pulled up the bubonic plague and read about it.

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