Coming November 19: Politics in Public Health
How the Federal Government Politicized the Nation’s Public Health and Increased Our Health Risks
Please purchase tickets by 6:00pm, Sunday, November 16, here.
Dr. Alan Lifson
Join the Bellingham City Club on November 19th as Dr. Alan Lifson discusses how the current federal administration has systematically and severely damaged the nation’s public health infrastructure by ignoring science and promoting unproven, false or misleading narratives; gutting the nation’s public health agencies; causing severe cutbacks in medical research on new developments to prevent or treat disease; and abandoning our support for global public health.
These changes have made those of us in Washington state and Whatcom County more vulnerable to a wide variety of health threats, and less able to respond to pandemics that we will likely face in the future. He will also discuss what we can do to protect our own health.
Dr. Alan Lifson is Professor Emeritus from the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health’s Division of Epidemiology and Community Health, and School of Medicine’s Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health.
After completing his internal medicine residency and infectious disease fellowship in San Francisco, he joined the Centers for Disease Control as an Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer assigned to the AIDS Program. His also served as Chief of AIDS Research for the San Francisco Health Department, and Head of the Acute Disease Prevention Section with the Minnesota Department of Health (where he oversaw the state’s vaccine program).
He is an author or coauthor on over 100 articles and book chapters, and has conducted research, taught, or consulted in multiple countries, including Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa, especially Ethiopia where he worked for more than a decade.
His research and other activities have included multiple populations, including gay and bisexual men, injection drug users, native Americans, refugees and immigrants, COVID patients in nursing homes, and rural Africans. He has contributed guest editorials for the Cascadia Daily News and Seattle Times.
Land Acknowledgement
The Board of the Bellingham City Club has adopted the following land acknowledgement to introduce its public programs:
We begin by acknowledging, with humility, that the land where we are today is the territory of the People of the Salish Sea. Their presence is imbued in the waterways, shorelines, valleys and mountains of the traditional homelands of the Coast Salish People, and it has been this way since time immemorial.
For information about the land acknowledgement adopted by the Lummi Business Council, click here.
For a video about the Ferndale Public Schools land acknowledgement produced by Ferndale School District, Children of the Setting Sun, and the Lhaqtemish Foundation, click here.