A well-functioning public health system is vital to keeping individuals, and the population at large, safe and healthy. Except that success is often invisible when it comes to public health—we don't notice it until the system breaks down.

The U.S. public health system has taken a drubbing from COVID-19. But the pandemic has also driven home just how critical it is to invest in this key component of national infrastructure.

On the latest episode of The Dose, Dr. Dave Chokshi, who led New York's pandemic response as the city's health commissioner, talks about how we can apply the lessons of the past two years in rebuilding the U.S. public health system.

"If we take the opportunity to build [a] community-based public health infrastructure, to embrace a mission of health equity as fundamental to health, then that's what will help to protect… our community as a whole," he says.