Dr. Bonnie Henry is a Canadian physician who is the Provincial Health Officer for British Columbia and Clinical Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia. She is a specialist in public health and preventive medicine (also known as community medicine).
Many people in British Columbia stop what they are doing at 3 PM and watch or listen to Dr. Henry. She's been the calm comforting word for our Province during the COVID-19 crisis. I'm hoping she will be a recipient of the Order of Canada!
Wikipedia has a very interesting bio on Dr. Henry:
Henry completed medical school at Dalhousie University Faculty of Medicine, and went on to complete a masters of public health in San Diego. Henry served as a medical officer for the Royal Canadian Navy while working on her degree at Dalhousie, and was based out of CFB Esquimalt on Vancouver Island, B.C. She was a medical resident at the University of California, San Diego, before returning to Canada to practice community medicine at the University of Toronto.
In the early 2000s, Henry served as part of the World Healthy Organization - UNICEF polio eradication program in Pakistan. She continued to work with the World Health Organization in 2001, moving to Uganda to support their efforts to tackle the Ebola virus disease. Henry helped to establish the Canada Pandemic Plan, which contains recommendations for health-related activities during the spread of a virus.
Henry joined the Toronto Public Health as an associate medical health officer, where she led the communicable disease unit. In this capacity she coordinated the Toronto response to the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Influenza A virus subtype H1N1 outbreaks. In 2005 Henry was made Director of Communicable Disease prevention and public health management at the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. She helped Canada to plan and police the 2010 Winter Olympics.
In 2013 Henry was made Executive Director of the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control. She was made Deputy Provincial Health Officer in 2014. She helped to lead British Columbia through a catastrophic wildfire season, which impacted the air quality, as well as advising the Government of Canada on the Influenza A virus subtype N7N9 epidemic.
In 2018, Henry was appointed as the Provincial Health Officer for British Columbia, and is the first woman to hold the role. She chairs the pandemic influenza task group. The group looks to minimize the number of people who become seriously ill during a pandemic, as well as limiting the social disruptions. She called for more efficient electronic systems to understand vaccine uptake, as well as manage Canada's vaccine inventory.
Henry is involved with coordinating and communicating British Columbia's response to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic in British Columbia. The Globe and Mail described Henry as "a calming voice in a sea of coronavirus madness". Impressed with her proactive management of the pandemic, two Canadian women recorded a video, "Dear Dr. Bonnie", which is a parody of the Hamilton soundtrack "Dear Theodosia".
She is so calming and explains everything very well. People pay attention and listen to her. She's become quite a celebrity. She was featured on a CBC special on COVID-19 and written up in the New York Times! There is a few songs that have been written about her and now she has a shoe designed to honour her!
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| Created by John Fluevog |
This is the article in the New York Times on April 11th:
by Catherine Porter
This week I had the opportunity to speak to Dr. Bonnie Henry. Before corona virus and Covid-19 had entered my vocabulary, I had never heard of British Columbia’s provincial health officer.
Now, it feels like she has become one of the most famous and beloved people in Canada.
She has inspired fan clubs, musical tributes, T-shirts and street art. Musician and lawyer Phil Dwyer wrote a ballad about her that his friends and son helped him record and mix remotely. Two days after it was uploaded to SoundCloud, the song had been listened to 20,000 times.
“We all share this person who comes and talks to us every day. The interesting thing is she is delivering, for the most part, really awful news: more people sick, more people dead, more people going to die. But somehow, the way she does it and the level of empathy she shows, it just seems like she is the right person for us at this time,” Mr. Dwyer, who lives on Vancouver Island, told me. “She is who we needed.”
Dr. Henry is not alone. Public health officials across Canada have become veritable folk heroes. In Quebec, Dr. Horacio Arruda’s animated face has appeared on loaves of bread, coffee cups, coloring books, windows and tattoo designs. After he announced he planned to spend the weekend inside, baking Portuguese tarts, his local fan club hosted two Facebook live session on “how to bake natas.”
In Calgary, clothing designers hooked up with a local artist to make 1,100 T-shirts featuring the face of Dr. Deena Hinshaw,, Alberta’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, and three other newly famous female health officers. They quickly sold out. “She’s someone we trust, because there is no political layer,” said Emma May, a designer on the project who normally makes women’s business attire. “She has no agenda. Her agenda is science.”
The public health doctor as hero phenomenon is not unique to Canada but it’s certainly pronounced here. It’s a particular contrast to the polarized reception Dr. Anthony Fauci has faced across the border. There, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease has garnered devout fans but also so many public enemies he’s had to beef up his personal security.
I called a few people to get their take on why this was happening.
Josh Greenberg, a professor of communication who focuses on public health at Carleton University in Ottawa, said that Canada’s public health doctors were filling a void created by “preening” celebrities.
“Ordinary people don’t have time for celebrity peacocks when the world is burning,” he said. “There is a void created because there is so much mistrust in politicians, mistrust in traditional institutions like journalism, that we go to these figures who were largely up until now backstage players and we are putting them onstage by making them celebrities,” he said.
Jeremy Frimer is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Winnipeg who studies moral heroes. He told me that whether consciously done or not, the creation of moral heroes during times like these is an “advantageous social strategy.” They lead by example, convincing rule breakers to fall in line.
“They mobilize the masses to do their part,” he told me. “That’s the difference between social distancing and washing our hands and not.”
There is something both intimate and collective about the role they play right now, speaking directly to each of us from the television or livestream.
They are also very relatable. This week, Dr. Henry admitted during her regular update that she had been forced to cut her hair herself.
Dr. Henry told me the surge of adulation has been “scary, embarrassing almost” and “really, really touching.”
“I’m an introvert — it’s not my nature to be the face of things,” she said from her office in Victoria where she’s received flowers, home-baked cookies and cards.
“In doing our jobs as best we can most of the time, you don’t see us, because there aren’t major outbreaks,” she said, adding: “We are doing things like putting in no smoking bylaws.”
She told me that she came by her calm delivery — lauded by many as anxiety reducing — naturally. Her first job as a physician was in the Navy, where she worked on a ship in Esquimalt. “I remember basic training,” she said, “I was criticized because I don’t yell loud enough.”
She has deep experience working in epidemics, from contact tracing ebola patients in Uganda in the early 2000s to helping quarterback Toronto’s response to SARS in 2003. “I’ve been working in outbreaks around world for 30 years,” said Dr. Henry, 54. “I never ever thought we’d be in pandemic like this.”
The day she decided schools would have to close, she said she was in shock.
“It felt like a bad dream, like the movie ‘Contagion.’ It wasn’t real.”
Today's song:
Ballard of Dr Bonnie Henry
