From New York Times, I'm Michael Borrow. This is Adali.

Today, in their efforts to fight the pandemic, local public health officials have become the target of protest.

We will give no more ground. We will not comply.

Anger. The governing body should fear the people. We are pissed off.

Threats. You, doctor, are going to be arrested for crimes against humanity.

There's a lot of good guys out there ready to do bad things soon.

And increasingly, laws intended to limit their power.

My colleagues have been investigating how all of that is impacting the ability of public health workers to do their jobs.

And whether it's left the country, less prepared than ever for the next public health crisis.

I spoke with my colleague, Mike Baker, about what they found.

It's Thursday, November 11th.

Mike, tell us how this investigation into the state of our public health agencies got started.

Well, I've been covering the pandemic since basically the beginning when the first cases arrived in Seattle.

And what was clear even early on in those days was how critical public health departments were going to be to confronting the virus to stopping the pandemic.

Public health is really a patchwork system of agencies, both at the state and local level that work together across the country.

And so in COVID hits, these public health agencies are responsible for monitoring the cases that arise in their community to figure out quarantine protocols to recommending or instituting or implementing mask mandates and establishing the kinds of rules and protocols that businesses and schools and everyone's going to be following.

For the course of the pandemic, right. But almost from the start of the pandemic, I think we all saw this resistance to the notion of public health mandates and how public health operates.

And what we've increasingly seen over the course of this year is that a lot of that resistance is actually starting to become policy.

So earlier this year, I teamed up with my colleague, Daniel Ivory, and she has been leading a COVID data team throughout much of the pandemic.

So we started combing through all the states looking for new laws and proposals on the table that would undermine public health.

We began reaching out to every health department to see what kinds of changes they were seeing in their departments.

And what we found was a pretty bleak picture for them.

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