1/ I’ve got to be honest, I’m mortified by the “trust me I’m an epidemiologist” and other disciplinary flexing and strutting I've been seeing on social media.

2/ We’re living through an epic failure of public health resulting in mass, racialized misery and death. This should be a time for somber reflection, not self-promotion and opportunism.

3/ We have a moral responsibility to use the newfound attention we’re receiving in more productive ways. Many of our de facto spokespeople are doing just that, and are doing incredible work — but I think we need to go further.

4/ I’m ashamed that some of our most famous, well-respected, professionally secure colleagues have casually called for reckless policies that would risk “other people’s lives”—disproportionately poor, working class, and BIPOC

5/ I’m ashamed that we let our field’s leaders do things like claim that healthcare is a human right, but not demand they actually take a stand on specific policies that would actually ensure that it is.

6/ We’ve utterly failed to properly politicize our work over the past 30 years, we’ve failed to speak truth to power, and failed to fight the partisan fights that needed to be fought.

7/ Instead of viewing the task of research, policy, and politics as *changing* what is possible, we’ve accepted the neoliberal notion that those things are about what is currently possible under the status quo.

8/All too often, we’ve deferred or ingratiated ourselves to power, chosen technocratic tinkering over joining the struggles for the universal policies that we already know we need.

9/ We don’t need any more research to join the fight for things like universal single payer healthcare and unprecedented investments in housing, living wages, education, and jobs.

10/ Of course there are exceptions, and yes there are numerous social forces at work. The incentive structures of our profession actively discourage real political and social mobilization in favor of ever more research on ever more byzantine questions.

11/ And of course many of those forces have been well documented and track broader trends in the corporatization of the university and health research.

12/ But in any case, trust needs to be earned. Not the trust of those willing to sacrifice lives for the sake of the economy, but the trust of the people whose lives are being offered up. I’m not sure we deserve it yet.