Dr. Jerome Adams, former U.S. surgeon general during President Donald Trump’s first administration, offered some communication advice to hospitals and health care providers during a media briefing on Tuesday.
Responding to a question from Newsweek, Adams shared three strategies for hospitals and health care providers working to effectively communicate public health information in a second Trump term, one with an infirm position on vaccines and possible cuts to major health care programs.
First, he pointed to previous advocacy work in Indiana—a Republican state—which helped secure $225 million in state funding to improve public health.
“We did it not by making the moral case for public health, but by making an economic case for public health,” Adams said.
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He recommended explaining that states with strong health care systems are better at recruiting companies and can support those companies with healthier, more productive workforces. In addition, American companies could benefit from lower health care expenses, which are a significant contributor to their greatest expense: labor.
Next, Adams encouraged hospitals to empower health care providers to have better conversations with patients and to embed public health information in every encounter. He recommended enabling other caregivers, like doulas and community health care workers, to do the same.
“I don’t care what they’re coming in for,” Adams said. “Talk to them about smoking cessation, talk to them about vaccines, talk to them about issues that we know will improve their broader health.”
Finally, he said that health care professionals and organizations need to do a better job of validating people’s concerns and understanding why some are distrustful of government institutions and health care systems.
“You can’t shame people into changing their opinion about something, and unfortunately, we leaned into the shaming and the blaming far too much [during the COVID-19 pandemic],” Adams said.
“In turn, we actually created more mistrust,” he continued. “We have to figure out how to validate without validating the misinformation.”
The briefing was organized by Defend Public Health, which described itself in a news release as “an all-volunteer network of public health researchers, health care workers, advocates and allies fighting to protect the health of all from the Trump administration’s cruel attacks on proven, science-based public health policies.”
In January, the coalition penned an open letter—signed by more than 700 members—opposing the Senate’s confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Adams was joined by Leslie Frane, executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union; Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, co-founder and executive director of the virtual community MomsRising; and Sriha Srinivasan, a medical student at George Washington University and creator of the TikTok page @sexedu, which promotes sexual health and education to more than 186,000 followers.
Rowe-Finkbeiner and Srinivasan also responded to Newsweek’s question, both urging hospitals and health care professionals to share accurate public health information online—especially as federal health agencies are taking down certain webpages in the AI age.
“AI pulls together all the information that’s out there now,” Rowe-Finkbeiner said. “Be a part of the solution. Be part of the information that [AI] pulls together in the top line.”
Throughout the discussion, speakers also expressed concerns about the Trump administration’s impact on public health pillars, including cuts to federal research and, potentially, Medicaid.
Adams zeroed in on vaccination as his top public health concern, noting that the National Institutes of Health recently canceled more than 40 studies of vaccine hesitancy.
“Inaction or missed messaging can and will exacerbate distrust and hesitancy and undermine our public health efforts,” Adams said. “As I said before, and as every surgeon general before me has said, vaccines are one of our most effective tools to protect the public health. The ability of a minority to remain unvaccinated has always depended on the willingness of the majority to protect them.”
