Millie LaFontaine is a retired physician who lives in Concord.

Do you remember what you were doing at the end of March five years ago? I remember what I was doing.

In March 2020, I was trying to postpone our airline reservations to see our new grandson halfway across the country. Suddenly, I had no idea when we would be able to meet. Would it be “by Easter” as promised by the president? We all knew that was a wildly inaccurate prediction. My prediction was that it would be when my grandson would not only be walking but running. I was right.

This time five years ago we didn’t understand what had hit us. During those first few weeks we were all dumbly fumbling around, wondering if we had to leave our groceries outside for several days before we could bring them in, if we could risk talking to someone on the back porch, if there was any place left in town where we could find paper towels or toilet paper.

The COVID-19 pandemic changed everything for us. Even before we learned what SARS-CoV-2 was and how it was transmitted, our first responders and service workers were risking their lives for us, our children were struggling with remote learning and the lucky ones among us were hunkering down at home.

Untold millions of people worldwide contracted this deadly virus, and a staggering number died. If we ever needed proof that we as a nation can’t wall ourselves off from the rest of the world, the way COVID-19 spread across the globe, practically in the blink of an eye, should have driven that fact home.

Our collective memory is notoriously short. Hardly a single one of us had been alive in 1918, and the lessons of the Great Influenza Pandemic were lost to us. We had the false sense that we had all the tools we needed to ward off something similar, and our president reinforced that. We chafed at the sound public health measures that were necessary to reduce the threat: meticulous hygiene, social distancing and universal masking. Even when these were statistically proven to make a difference, many among us scoffed and believed they knew better than scientists and public health experts.

In fact, instead of listening to experts who knew something, we grasped for straws, fighting to obtain ineffective or dangerous treatments, like hydroxychloroquine, or even considering bleach, as suggested by the president. We divided into camps, largely along political lines. Those of us at least trusting in the expertise and authority of our scientists gratefully accepted the protection offered by the vaccines which they had quickly developed, tested and monitored in real time. Those believing that their personal rights outweighed any sort of “government mandate” listened to vaccine skeptics and conspiracy theorists. It would appear that they believed their personal freedom trumped the greater good.

Five years in, the pandemic is not the daily threat it was when it first appeared, but it has by no means disappeared. People still contract it, and people still die of it. Worse than that, our public health system has been hobbled and damaged by the public’s distrust of the efforts its scientists and health professionals undertook to help us emerge from the crisis that COVID-19 posed.

Now, in just a few short weeks, our newly elected president and his misguided appointees have fanned the flames of vaccine skepticism. Worse, they have deliberately muzzled our national health experts in the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and other federal health agencies, and they have stripped funding from vital research and health programs proven to be beneficial here and abroad.

Medicaid and Medicare are on the chopping block. Essential federal agencies have been dismantled and sound decisions by previous administrations have been reversed.

All of this has no precedent and appears to be out of ignorance at the very least or pure malice at the worst.

We are five years out from the start of the pandemic. My grandson is now a busy, energetic 5-year-old, curious and full of life. Sadly, thanks to this administration and our abysmal collective memory, I am worried about the world he will inherit. His risk of infectious illnesses may rise, and the next pandemic may already be on the horizon.

Even if his own vaccines protect him, what adverse health effects will he nonethelessmexperience due to other factors, including climate change? What health measures will no longer be available? Which research breakthroughs won’t have happened?

My grandson deserves better than this. We all do. We need to expose the hypocrisy and willful ignorance of those currently leading us. We can’t simply wall ourselves off from the world or the facts. We need to learn from the past and to restore public trust in our institutions.

And we need to elect leaders who actually lead.