What happened in California? Missing science and murky emergency laws during Covid
Kevin Bardosh sits down with Rajiv Bhatia, a Stanford primary care physician and former deputy health officer in San Francisco, California. Rajiv discusses his experience challenging the state of emergency in California on ethical and process grounds, including his communication with public health colleagues in the early days of the Covid pandemic. A veteran public health officer, Rajiv also discusses the alarming lack of basic epidemiological analysis in California at the time and the implications of this, as the pandemic evolved, for government policy blindspots and groupthink. We finish by reflecting on the future of pandemic response.
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About Rajiv Bhatia
Rajiv is a physician-scientist and social medicine practitioner whose innovations in translational science and public health practice have impacted social and environmental determinants of health at the local state and national level.
For 16 years, he served as a Deputy Health officer and Director of Environmental Health for the City and County of San Francisco, creating the country’s first local public health initiative for health and social justice, expanding the menu of local public health practice to address issues of labor rights, food security, and affordable housing, and pioneering techniques for health impact assessment, neighbourhood health indicators, and health-oriented environmental design.
Currently, he practices medicine at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration, teaches Stanford University internal medicine trainees. He is also the co-founder of Medwiki, a global social impact startup that aims to “democratise” population knowledge of healthcare and medicines through virtual health literacy tools.
About Kevin Bardosh
Kevin Bardosh is the Director of Collateral Global, a UK-based charity dedicated to researching the global impacts of Covid-19 policy responses and helping the world better balance societal trade-offs during future health emergencies. He has worked in more than 20 countries on infectious disease control programs (including Ebola and Zika), authored more than 50 peer-reviewed publications and edited two books. He is currently an Affiliate Assistant Professor in the School of Public Health, University of Washington USA and an Honorary Lecturer at the Edinburgh Medical School, University of Edinburgh UK.
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