A conversation on ‘The Cure for Everything’: Where American public health is and where it’s headed

For the first time in a century, American life expectancy is declining, an unprecedented trend for a wealthy nation and one driven largely by preventable causes of early death. The foundations of public health reforms — sanitation, clean water, safe housing, pollution control, workplace safety, and more — doubled America’s life expectancy between the mid-1800s and today. But the nation has now spent a century shifting money and attention away from public health and toward clinical medicine. The pandemic exposed the cost of that shift, including widening health inequities, inadequate emergency response coordination, and erosion of public trust. In her book “The Cure for Everything: The Epic Struggle for Public Health and a Radical Vision for Human Thriving,” Michelle Williams tells the story of how the U.S. overcame a history of infectious disease, poisonous environments, and early death and how it’s still possible to rebalance clinical medicine and public health to prevent hundreds of thousands of annual avoidable premature deaths and improve all Americans’ quality of life. In this webinar, Williams talks about key lessons from her book that could inspire lines of investigation for journalists. Linda Marsa, a health journalist who helped Williams with the book, briefly addresses how that collaboration worked and how journalists can mine the book for story ideas in their communities. _____________________ To learn more, visit HealthJournalism.org. This webinar was recorded on Jan. 28, 2026.