Late last spring, when measles was spreading in a West Texas town less than an hour from my house, I invited a different sort of possible disaster into my home.
My husband and I pulled dining room chairs and stools into a circle in our living room and welcomed an unlikely bunch: local pediatricians, some vaccine-skeptical mothers, and two senior members of the measles response team from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Our plan was to sit together and talk.
The story of this gathering is an interesting one. It started a few weeks after the outbreak began, shortly after the first child died. An editor from The New York Times asked me to write an essay about why conservative West Texans were increasingly refusing the measles vaccine despite the risks of the disease. I took the assignment, but it turned into an essay about crumbling trust in public health institutions since the pandemic.
After the article published, my inbox was swarmed with responses. Some of it was hate mail from people who thought I was dangerous—or dangerously stupid. But I also got notes from people working in public health and vaccine development who wanted to talk. Among them was Jonathan Yoder, a fellow Christian and deputy director in the CDC’s Division of Infectious Disease Readiness and Innovation.
“Your article touched on some very important issues of credibility, humility, and trust that I think are the critical pieces for moving forward in a post-pandemic world,” he said in his email. “We have a good deal of work to do to build bridges in this polarized environment. Are you interested in having a further conversation on this topic?” I was.
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A few days later, while I was waiting for my daughter to finish a theater class, Jonathan called. I almost laughed at the absurdity: I’m a writer and a mother and the communications director at our church. I have no expertise in public health or medicine. That I’d be consulted by a CDC official about measles felt almost ridiculous, and I said so: “People in your position don’t normally talk to people in mine about professional concerns.”
“Yeah,” he said with a chuckle, “I think that’s part of our problem.”
We chatted for half an hour, our conversation ranging from how his faith shaped his career to his current work on the measles task force to our mutual frustration with how science became politicized during the pandemic. We didn’t agree on everything, of course, but we shared about our families and the things we had in common. As we talked, I felt my anger and suspicion toward the CDC start to soften.
Those feelings, to be clear, were nearly subconscious. I’m not walking around seething at the CDC. But like many other politically conservative Americans, including many evangelicals, I’d come to think of the CDC as a monster that kept children—my children—out of school during the pandemic. I’d begun to associate the agency with old people dying alone in nursing homes, with small businesses being forced to shut down because of how their states interpreted the agency’s recommendations, with people I know losing their jobs because they refused to be vaccinated.
My distrust of the CDC never led me to change my mind about the value of standard childhood vaccines. Yet it isn’t hard for me to understand why some people did alter their opinions. Since the pandemic, it’s understandable that the CDC is the object of so many people’s anger, suspicion, and sense of betrayal. I could feel the edges of that bitter terrain within my own heart.
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That conversation changed things for me. I wasn’t talking to an opaque government institution. I was talking to Jonathan. We saw some things differently, but we agreed on a lot. And in our respective spheres of influence, we were both trying to figure out how to put back together what was broken, how to build bridges that the last half decade had washed away.
A few weeks after that first call, Jonathan accepted my invitation to move the conversation offline. We invited more folks to join us: his colleague who works with the CDC’s childhood vaccine program, my pediatrician and other doctors she knew nearby, and a couple mothers who don’t vaccinate their kids and were brave enough to talk about it to the CDC. With mutual assurances that everyone would stay civil, we set a time and arranged the chairs.
I was nervous that evening. I lit a candle, picked up a stray sock, said a little prayer, and fluffed a few pillows. The first guests looked as anxious as I felt. Only Rusty, our overly friendly goldendoodle, seemed perfectly unfazed. He bounced around in pure delight: So many new friends here to see me!
We introduced ourselves, then started talking. It was easier than I expected. That night was off-the-record, but I can tell you everyone was curious and kind. We didn’t hide our differences of opinion, but we listened and asked sincere questions. It’s harder to reduce people to an opinion you dislike when you’re looking them in the eye.
By the end of the night, everyone looked a little dazed. We weren’t sure what had happened or what good it could do in the world. The divides we tried to reach across—between the pro- and anti-vax, those who trust public health agencies and those who don’t—are too big to overcome in my living room. But perhaps we each made some change in the world within, learning to see a person where once we saw only a problem. And in the weeks that followed, I came to think that was no small thing.
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In early April, the CDC began mass layoffs, with plans to eliminate one-fifth of its workforce. Anytime I’d hear about more upheaval, I’d text Jonathan to see how he was faring. Then, in early August, a gunman opened fire at the CDC’s Atlanta office, firing off multiple rounds and killing a police officer. I texted again, telling Jonathan I was praying for him and his colleagues. A few weeks later came even more reports of chaos at the agency: One month after her Senate confirmation, CDC director Susan Monarez was fired by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, and several more high-level CDC officials resigned in protest.
I understand that for Americans who have been harmed by CDC recommendations, this chaos might seem like good news. But when I picture the CDC now, I think of riding on a train with no brakes, an airplane that has lost an engine, a ship navigating ice without instruments. Maybe the CDC is too big. Maybe it’s been going the wrong way. But if it goes down, the damage will be enormous.
Though many Americans seem to have an appetite for institutional destruction these days, I feel no nostalgia for the years when mothers worried about polio. And I worry about unforeseen and unintended consequences of rapid and ill-considered change. What will we fail to notice until it’s too late? Until the damage is already done?
Amid all this, I find myself often thinking back to that conversation in my living room. Maybe the problem is we’ve made our world small in all the wrong ways: We reduce living, breathing human beings to pixels on a screen, flattening them into a list of opinions to be graded against our own.
Or maybe the problem is we’ve made our world large in all the wrong ways: Rather than talking to our neighbors across the street, we shout at the cable news panels beaming in from across the country.
Or maybe the problem isn’t just scale but a lost sense of reality, a lost feel for truth and love and community. We’ve become so disoriented, so unsure of what’s real, that we tear down the very people and institutions we need to live well.
That conversation in my living room escaped these problems, I think. We made our world small in the right way and large in the right way, and we were able to do that because, for all our differences, as Christians, Jonathan and I agreed about truth. We agreed about what is good and necessary in following Christ: humility over hubris, listening over speaking, and reconciliation over revenge.
Last month, I reached out to Jonathan again—this time on the record—to see how he’s thinking about institutional trust and public health going forward. “Maybe in the 1950s, there was a time when we would all just trust our doctor or the health authorities,” he told me in an interview. “But that that ship has sailed.”
“To be effective now, we need to make sure that we’re meeting people where they are, understanding what their motivations are, and understanding what’s important to them,” he continued. “We can’t conclude that they don’t love their children or judge that they don’t love their community just because they make a different decision from the one we recommend.”
That’s possible only if experts listen at least as much as they speak—and if they respond to rejection of their advice with patience rather than force. When it became clear that the community at the center of the Texas measles outbreak wouldn’t accept vaccines, for example, Jonathan and his team changed tactics. They focused on educating the public about other ways to keep measles from spreading, like staying home when sick and knowing when to seek medical care.
“We don’t want to just put up a barrier that says, ‘If you’re not going to get vaccinated, we don’t really have anything else to offer,’” Jonathan told me. “In the case of measles, I doubt we will change the recommendation to get vaccinated. But it doesn’t mean that’s the only thing we have to offer to help you keep you and your family healthy, to keep your community safe.”
I don’t know how much or how quickly this approach can change public perception of the CDC—let alone foster trust in institutions more broadly. I do know that it’s vital for Christians in civil service and other public roles to stay the course, to treat their work as an outpouring of their faith. I imagine this must be particularly difficult right now, not only because of political upheaval but also because seeking to be a trustworthy person at an institution that has lost public trust must be deeply disheartening.
But we need trustworthy people more than ever. Our society can’t function without good institutions, and Christians are uniquely positioned to work toward the reconciliation we need. After all, outrage is not a sufficient response to everything we oppose or don’t understand.
That’s not to say outrage is never warranted. Like many, I’ve long thought we need a post-COVID-19 reckoning on public health, especially after learning some of the ways in which science was manipulated and information was controlled during the pandemic. Shouting, “Trust the science!” and issuing edicts that demolish people’s lives and livelihoods was not right during COVID, nor will it be right in public health crises to come.
But reckoning and retribution, as we’ve seen of late, are not the same thing. Chaos and confusion are not the way of Christ, for “God is not a God of disorder but of peace” (1 Cor. 14:33). Christians in positions of institutional authority can and must model a gentler and better way, a way that values people above ideology and remembers that no human expert is the source of ultimate truth.
“Science should be humble, right? Science should be saying that what I know today is only a fraction of what I’ll know tomorrow, and so I shouldn’t hold on to what I know today as if it’s revealed truth,” Jonathan mused. “We could talk about what we are learning in better ways. A stance of humility would certainly go a long way.”
Just as at my house that night, this might not seem like much of a solution. It’s no dramatic reform or sweeping federal initiative. But it does make a difference. It is a mustard-seed transformation. It is a small ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor. 5:18). It is a step back toward trust.
Carrie McKean is a West Texas–based writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Texas Monthly magazine. Find her at carriemckean.com.
