Welcome to Public Health On Call, a new podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Our focus is the novel coronavirus. I'm Josh Sharfstein, a faculty member at Johns Hopkins,

and also a former secretary of Maryland's health department.

Our goal with this podcast is to bring evidence and experts

to help you understand today's news about the novel coronavirus

and what it means for tomorrow.

If you have questions, you can email them

to public health question at jh.h.u. That's public health Question at jh.edu.

That's public health question at jh.u.edu for future podcast episodes.

In this brief bonus episode, I asked Dr. George's Benjamin, executive director of the American

Public Health Association, about the increasing harassment of many state and local health officials

in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Let's listen.

Dr. Benjamin, thank you for joining me for a quick discussion about this trend that we're

seeing with health officers being personally attacked, harassed, you know, aggressive demonstrations right in front of their house,

in some cases, fired, forced to resign,

or just driven out of office.

Does this situation have precedent in recent years?

It has no precedent in recent years.

In fact, as you know, most public health work

is done very quietly behind the scenes.

And generally, public health practitioners

...