Connect With Your Community!
Connect With Your Community!
When Emilie Sayler - outside her Virginia City, Montana, office on Oct. 6, 2021 - started as Madison County public health officer a few months ago, she thought her local roots would help persuade residents of this rural area to follow her covid recommendations. Instead, she's found resistance. (Nick Ehli for KHN)
VIRGINIA CITY, Mont. - Emilie Sayler's roots run deep in southwestern Montana. She serves on a nearby town council and the board of the local Little League. She went to college in a neighboring county and regularly volunteers in the schools of her three kids.
Just a few months into her new job as public health director for Madison County, she had hoped that those local connections might make a difference, that the fewer than 10,000 residents spread out across this agricultural region would see her familiar face and support her efforts to curtail the covid-19 pandemic raging here.
That largely...
