By the end of January, when she walked into the building and took the elevator to the seventh floor, she was asking the universe a question: “Why won’t you let me do my job?” A bitterness she thought she’d banished had returned. She felt a despair she had not felt in a decade. “I was the lone person in state public health who was saying this is a pandemic,” she said. “I wasn’t talking to anyone else. I had no validation that I wasn’t a crazy person.”
