Public Health Survived the Pandemic. Now It Fights Politics.

U.S.|Public Health Survived the Pandemic. Now It Fights Politics.

For months, Dr. Jennifer Avegno, the director of the New Orleans Health Department, has watched the threats come closer: Louisiana led the United States as seasonal flu cases surged to their highest rate in 15 years, and had the nation’s first death from bird flu. Then came a deadly measles outbreak in neighboring Texas. The number of Louisiana schoolchildren with exemptions to vaccine requirements doubled in a year.

During the Covid pandemic, Dr. Avegno worked with state officials to tame high infection rates and promote vaccines. But after taking office last year, Gov. Jeff Landry began carrying out a promise to remake public health after the state’s Covid response, which he thought was a disaster.

Mr. Landry, a Republican, created a position for a state surgeon general, appointing Dr. Ralph Abraham, a former congressman who had railed against the state’s “tyrannical” Covid response and argued that the real risk was not the virus itself but the vaccines against it.

So it was not entirely a surprise when Dr. Abraham announced last month that Louisiana would “no longer promote mass vaccination,” calling efforts to do so during Covid “an offense against personal autonomy that would take years to overcome.”

To Dr. Avegno, it was a blunt reminder of how the political aftereffects of the pandemic have left her field worse prepared in many ways to fight the next one.

“We’re in a very different world right now,” she said. “We are now prepared to throw the baby out with the bath water and leave ourselves incredibly vulnerable.”