NIH Director Monica Bertagnolli Talks Rebuilding Public Health Trust Post-Covid

Former Harvard Medical School professor Monica M. Bertagnolli spoke about the need to restore trust in public health after her appointment as National Institutes of Health director in November.

In August 2022, Bertagnolli — then a professor of surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital — was tapped to lead the National Cancer Institute by U.S. President Joe Biden, becoming the institute’s first female director. In May, Biden selected Bertagnolli to lead the NIH, the primary federal agency for medical research.

In a December interview, Bertagnolli said the Covid-19 pandemic revealed “tragedies” in “our abilities to deliver health care to some populations who suffer disproportionately from the trauma, the loss of life, and other disabilities that were created by this new infectious agent.”

“The biomedical research enterprise and fundamental science is producing incredible insights at a pace we have never seen before,” she said. “What we need to do is to go into overtime in translating those amazing results into benefits for people — and that means all people, including those who, for one reason or another, have been left out of the benefits of biomedical research.”

Scientific researchers, Bertagnolli said, need to better communicate the importance of their work to groups with low trust in public health authorities.

“We need to own every single piece of the path from scientific discovery to, ‘We’ve proven to the people we serve that we can make their life better,’” Bertagnolli said.

She added that public health agencies must avoid assuming a “paternalistic attitude” toward the people they serve.

“Our biomedical research enterprise needs to be able to partner with those we serve to respect their beliefs and their desires for what health means to them and to deliver what they really value,” Bertagnolli said.

Despite the losses and suffering of the pandemic, Bertagnolli said the public health response “renewed our confidence in the power of science to bring cures and health but also really renewing our mandate and the urgency to deliver better treatments faster to people.”

For future healthcare workers, Bertagnolli had some words of encouragement.

“I can’t think of any other field that’s more important than biomedical research and being able to just directly demonstrate every single day that what you're doing is making the world a better place,” she said. “It’s such an honor to be in this field.”

—Staff writer Ammy M. Yuan can be reached at ammy.yuan@thecrimson.com.