Joe Vipond, a Canadian emergency room physician who was a strong supporter of masking during the pandemic, said in a speech last year that the slow recognition that COVID-19 is spread by airborne transmission resulted in what is likely “the most egregious public health error in modern history.”
The notion that governments can commit public health errors in response to a public health emergency like the COVID-19 pandemic — and that these errors can negatively impact a large number of people — has begun to receive attention from the scientific community and the popular press. Public health measures such as mask mandates, lockdowns, school closures and vaccine mandates are now widely discussed.
However, how can we investigate why governments err without understanding first what a public health error is, and is not? As a public health errors scholar, it strikes me how little research has been done on this topic, and how much confusion exists around what constitutes a public health error.
