DATE POSTED: May 16, 2024.

On January 26, 2024, the Rituals in the Making research team hosted its second virtual seminar that examined COVID-19 pandemic revisionism through the lens of social forgetting. The entire seminar can be viewed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4bY7RuX7w0&t=85s.

The seminar speakers included:

Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist and data scientist whose newsletter, Your Local Epidemiologist, explores topics including public health education and outreach, and pandemic revisionism.

Dr. Nancy Bristow, a historian who specializes in early 20th-century American history in terms of race and social change and author of American Pandemic: Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic (2012).

Paige Gavin, a second-year master’s student in anthropology at the George Washington University and a research assistant on the Rituals in the Making team, who moderated the event.

Now we’re in that moment, we can remember or we can forget, we can learn or we can turn our back on the education we’ve been offered through COVID-19. – Dr. Bristow

Dr. Bristow noted: “The flu pandemic of 1918 to 1920 faded from the nation’s attention, and ultimately, its public memory in the decades that followed the pandemic. As historian Alfred Crosby described this was in a sense, America’s forgotten pandemic. But in reality, we probably shouldn’t be that surprised about this national cases of amnesia. Historians have memory note that communities and nations routinely choose to remember some episodes and forget others in order to create a version of their past that fits their sense of themselves in the past and the present, and helps them imagine and dream for the future as they want. Such forgetting though, requires the erasure of significant parts of our past and often some of the most traumatic events.”

Now we’re in that moment, we can remember or we can forget, we can learn or we can turn our back on the education we’ve been offered through COVID-19. – Dr. Jetelina

Dr. Jetelina noted: “[T]here is a very scary decline in trust on an institutional level, but I’m very focused on public health and on science. . . . mistakes were made during the pandemic. Also, misinformation is supercharged by social media. And there’s also just bad actors driving the majority of, for example, anti-vaxx content. And so I think a lot of people need to work with these challenges and find solutions for them really quickly. So all of this kind of goes into reimagining public health and what we think as a society of public health for the 21st century.”