Patrick Allen was the director of the Oregon Health Authority from 2017 through 2022. He stepped down in January of 2023 after Tina Kotek took office as governor. He then became the secretary of the New Mexico Department of Health, a position he held for two years.

He joined OPB’s “Think Out Loud” to discuss his time running the state health agency during the height of the pandemic, and what he learned working through a once-in-a-century crisis.

What he thinks we might be remembering wrong about the pandemic

“I think there’s sort of this general notion that COVID wasn’t very serious and that a lot of what we remember that was bad during that time was not the disease but the reaction to the disease. And I don’t think that’s right. I think we’re beginning to remember things like, ‘Well, vaccines really didn’t work very well,’ and I think that’s demonstrably not true.”

When he knew COVID would be a crisis

“I remember in about January [2020], I think, where I went to a meeting of state agency leaders, and I said something to the general effect of, ‘Look, this could go a couple of ways. Either this could end up being a seasonal thing that hits us right now and goes away in the summer just like the flu does. Or it could be something very different and we’re going to be hanging on until there’s a vaccine and that might be a couple of years.

“I mean, Feb. 28 for the first case in Oregon, March 8, when the governor declared an emergency, March 23, when we shut down schools. I remember these dates like my own kids’ birth dates.”

How he thought about the potential health benefits of any given restriction and the social or economic problems that might follow from well-meaning restrictions.

“I vividly remember that kind of critical week, that second or third week in March, where we began to shut down gatherings and restaurants and those kinds of things.

“A friend I’ve known for 30 years was running the tourism association, and another friend who I had known for nearly as long was running the restaurant association, and calling these guys up, telling them, ‘Here’s what’s going to come,’ and really understanding the impact that was going to have on so many people and so many lives.

“In terms of schools, I was at the time chairing my local school board and … all of those decisions just felt so very visceral because you could see exactly what was happening and what was coming.

“At the same time you knew that more than probably any other decision or set of decisions you make in a health agency, real lives were on the line and not hypothetical deaths from cancer down the road, but real people like really getting sick right now, getting hospitalized right now and potentially dying right now.”

Does he have any regrets about the way Oregon handled school policies as a whole over the first two years of the pandemic?

“First, it’s worth remembering we were the ones who actually tried to keep schools open when we had the first cluster of cases which were all related to schools: the Lake Oswego custodians, someone at a basketball game in Pendleton, a school case in Hillsborough.

“We pulled together educational leaders, OEA, the school administrators’ association and leaders from large districts, and we talked through the reasons it’s important to keep schools open. And we all came to agreement that that’s what we were going to do.

“And a case cropped up at South Meadow in the Hillsborough district and after doing a deep clean, they brought kids back, and I was on the phone daily with the superintendent, and the first day, half the kids didn’t show up and the next day they had like 60% attendance, so it ticked up and we thought we were on a pretty good track. And then Ashland closed its district on its own and Lake Oswego closed its district.

“Basically, parents were voting with their feet and pulling their kids out of school regardless. And so at that point, the governor decided and we agreed to go ahead and close schools. I think I never appreciated how hard it was going to be to get them back open again. … I think we were closed for too long.

“I think the decision to prioritize teachers for vaccines without getting an agreement at the same time that once teachers are vaccinated, then that’s when we’re going to go back to school, was a big misstep …

“I think we didn’t learn quickly enough about air movement, ventilation systems in schools and how to figure out if you had enough ventilation to be able to make things work.”

Is there anything that could have been done differently on vaccine messaging to prevent more vaccine skepticism?

“This is challenging, and I do think about this a lot, almost every day … We were swimming against an absolute tidal wave of misinformation … We really struggled to figure out how to adequately respond to that misinformation …

“I think the other challenge is things changed over the course of the pandemic and people really struggled with that. When the vaccine first came out, it was in fact extremely effective at stopping the spread of disease. You were less likely to get COVID if you had been vaccinated — far better than anyone expected with the vaccines, something like 90% effective at being able to keep you from getting infected.

“That led to lots of things like vaccine requirements for people in health care positions and those sorts of things. The virus mutated and so that changed and what happened now is you maybe weren’t less likely to get COVID, but you were less likely to get it seriously and to have it for less time, and thus you would be less likely to spread it to somebody else.

“l and trying to keep up with that and explain that to people was just inordinately difficult, and I really struggled to try to figure out how could we have approached that differently while still maintaining what was true, which was the vaccine was a good thing that changed everything that made a big difference and saved lives.”

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News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/08/23/patrick-allen-former-oha-director-tol/