During my 2018 campaign for County Executive, I often spoke of health. I said that a government should be judged on the health and wellness of the people it serves.
That bulb lit up brightly for me on Tuesday this week when I was interviewing Anne Arundel County Health Officer Dr. Tonii Gedin for next Tuesday’s episode of Pittman and Friends Podcast.
I asked her how the health work that she did in a hospital ICU was different from the field of public health, from the work that she does in our county Department of Health. One, she said, was about the individual patient, and the other about the community, about the things that can be done to prevent illness and injury for all of the people.
We reflected on the pandemic, on how there was almost universal public engagement early on in slowing the spread of the virus through social distancing, testing, contact tracing, and early vaccinations, and how people protected the elderly and volunteered to help with food distribution for displaced workers.
Then there was a political movement against not only government implementation of public health guidance, but also against individual people who wore masks and got vaccinated. The heroes who worked in hospitals, clinics, and public health agencies came under attack from the very people they were trying to keep healthy. It was sad, and it was hard.
We lost 1,147 county residents during the pandemic, but our death rate was about half that of Maryland jurisdictions that resisted public health guidance. We saved a lot of lives.
The Department of Health also implements the recommendations of the Gun Violence Prevention Task Force that we formed in response to the 2018 Capital Gazette newsroom shootings. That work was also attacked as political, but it has continued as the interdepartmental Gun Violence Intervention Team (GVIT). It is modeled after the state-mandated Opioid Intervention Team (OIT). Both save lives, but only the GVIT is under regular political attack.
I watch Dr. Gedin and her team of public health heroes, and I am inspired. Like doctors and nurses who work to save patients regardless of who they are or what they believe, the public health team works to make our communities healthier whether we want it or not. They believe in us as human beings, and know that at the end of the day, we all want health, for ourselves, our families, and our neighbors. They can’t change the fact that we live in an era where public opinion is as likely to follow the stories planted by Russian trolls and conspiracy theorists as those reported by fact-checked journalists and scientists.
The political rebellion against public health has intensified a wider rebellion against government and everything it stands for. It is federal government workers who are under the harshest attack today, but the most hardened anti-government warriors extend their disdain and dehumanization to everyone who gets a state or local government paycheck, including teachers, police, and everything in between.
But the worst thing that public servants can do is to turn against the people we serve. We should do as our health heroes do - serve everyone regardless of their beliefs.
Governor Moore and the leadership of the Maryland General Assembly did exactly that in the final days of the session that ended Monday. They did what never happened when we had a Governor and General Assembly that didn’t respect one another. They addressed the fact that Maryland had a structural deficit papered over with federal money and one-time fund balances that were created by leaving essential positions vacant.
Throughout the 90-day session, lots of smart people had lots of legitimate ideas for spending cuts and revenue enhancements. They listened to business owners, to taxpayers, to the people who deliver public services, to county and municipal leaders, and to each other. They set aside their egos and they produced a balanced budget for the people of Maryland.
There are things in the budget that I don’t like, particularly the obligations transferred to our county budget. But we can live with it, and focus on the things we control. We will present a balanced budget to our seven County Council members on May 1 that protects our people as best we can, and we will cooperate fully as they amend the proposal in accordance with county law.
Our patient is the public institutions that serve our 600 thousand county residents, and our obligation is to protect its health.
Until next week…