The job of the public-health officer—or at least her job as the public-health officer—was a series of intense firefights. There was no standard operating procedure for many of the situations in which she found herself: usually, they were sufficiently different from anything that had ever before happened. If she waited until she had enough evidence to publish in a scientific journal, the battle would be over, and she’d have lost. Kids would lose limbs, or die. The decisions she was forced to make were less like, say, those made by a card counter at a blackjack table, and more like the ones made
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