“Our science spoke truth to power,” writes author and physician Mona Hanna-Attisha of her fight to force local, state, and federal officials to acknowledge their roles in burying the truth about the Flint water crisis. During this crisis, a hasty switch of Flint’s water source (meant to cut costs for the city’s budget) resulted in a water supply that was untreated with corrosion-control chemicals, allowing lead from old pipes to leach into the water supply of Flint residents. Mona and her colleagues were committed to exposing the truth of the crisis and helping Flints’ residents. Though self-doubt and fear of being attacked professionally threatened to derail their fight, they never wavered in their commitment to the truth. Mona and a number of dedicated activists refused to back down as government organizations tried to discredit their research, and so they were able to bring the truth about Flint to light for the whole country to see. With this, the book suggests that a “passion for the truth” is necessary to combat the kind of corruption that took place in Flint.
When Mona discovered that Michigan was engaged in a cover-up about the quality of Flint’s water, she was appalled—and she knew she had to do something. Even though “the urgency and scope of the problem” in Flint overwhelmed Mona, she felt so guilty about missing the early warning signs of the water crisis that she knew she had to help repair what was broken. As an advocate for her patients’ health, Mona knew that the kids she treated couldn’t afford to wait for help to arrive. Mona had to be the face of environmental and public health activism on behalf of her community. Years before the water crisis, Mona’s friend Elin was working at the Environmental Protection Agency during the D.C. water crisis (and the ensuing government coverup). Elin warned Mona that there would be a long road ahead, but Mona was ready to face it—all she cared about was finding a way to bring the truth to light using data from her patients’ blood-lead level tests. Mona knew that data was the surest way to prove the reality of what was happening in Flint. Mona’s collaboration with her research coordinator Jenny LaChance produced results that showed a spike in blood-lead levels in the children of Flint since the city’s water source was switched in 2014. Mona had proof of the city’s negligence and corruption. Mona wasn’t responsible for the water crisis, nor was it her job to fix it—the government was responsible, and so they should have taken the initiative to remedy it. But when city, state, and federal officials ignored and tried to cover up what was going on in Flint, Mona made the decision to take responsibility for the problem herself. Even though Mona had a busy home life and a lot of responsibilities already as a pediatrician at a bustling public hospital, she made her community her first priority.
As Mona started out on her journey as a whistleblower, she contended with people who were actively trying to undermine her research and allow state officials to get away with corruption. Once Mona did the painstaking work of gathering data on blood-lead levels from her own hospital, Hurley, as well as several other healthcare facilities in Flint, she revealed her findings in a groundbreaking independent press conference. The mayor’s office had failed to offer Mona their support, and, later, they would work to actively discredit her findings—but Mona was committed to telling the truth. Mona knew the institutions that had let the water crisis spiral out of control (by fudging test results, ignoring warning signs, and cutting corners) wouldn’t be quick to admit their wrongdoing. They were concerned with cutting costs and covering up their mistakes, not with protecting citizens’ health. But because Mona knew about the power and might of these institutions, she also knew that the only thing she could use against them was the cold, hard truth of her data.
As the backlash intensified, Mona and her team refused to compromise and in fact doubled down on their commitment to spreading the truth. When Michigan state officials tried to discredit Mona’s data, she didn’t let their deception get the best of her. Knowing that the state wasn’t taking a second look at their own data, Mona decided to take another look at her own—and she determined that if she used geographical information systems software, she’d be able to further tie the tainted water to specific areas of the city. Rather than questioning her research, Mona trusted in her work and remained committed to the truth. The government’s scare tactics and brutal dismissal of her didn’t rattle Mona because she knew that she was on “the right side of history.” She was facing down an egregious conspiracy of neglect and corruption—and committing to the truth, she knew, was the only way to expose it.
It was only through their refusal to back down that Mona and her team were able to pressure local, state, and federal authorities to end their coverup and admit the truth. After weeks of backlash, Eden Wells—the chief medical officer for the Michigan health department, which had been trying to attack Mona’s research—at last circulated an email to her colleagues stating that Mona’s research had a “strong foundation.” Within a few days, the state “surrendered,” and the county health department declared a public health emergency. Mona and her fellow activists’ commitment to truth was what forced the state of Michigan to admit that there was a serious crisis in Flint—and that state-run departments had played a large role in covering up the urgency of that crisis for a long time. Mona’s faith in her work’s integrity—and the activism she undertook as a result of that faith—toppled a web of lies that threatened the future of an entire generation of Flint residents.
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Truth vs. Corruption Quotes in What the Eyes Don’t See
This is the story of the most important and emblematic environmental and public health disaster of this young century. More bluntly, it is the story of a government poisoning its own citizens, and then lying about it. It is a story about what happens when the very people responsible for keeping us safe care more about money and power than they care about us, or our children.
There’s an expression I have always liked, a D. H. Lawrence distillation: The eyes don’t see what the mind doesn’t know.
“If Miguel’s right that Flint is not using corrosion control, that means there’s lead in Flint's water.”
“Lead in the water?”
[…] “And based on Miguel’s memo,” she went on, “the lead levels in the Flint water are really, really high. He suspects that MDEQ isn’t testing correctly. That’s why he leaked the memo.”
“Are you kidding me?” I shook my head. “Why would anybody at the EPA need to leak their own memo?”
Elin cocked her head and just stared at me, deadpan. She was waiting for me to catch up.
“He taught me to treat everybody well, because we are all equal, no matter what we look like, what we believe in, or how much money we have. To always do the right thing, even if it’s hard. Even if people tell you it’s impossible.”
Being a pediatrician—perhaps more than any other kind of doctor—means being an advocate for your patient. It means using your voice to speak up for kids. We are charged with the duty of keeping these kids healthy.
We took an oath.
Where had we been?
Where had I been?
If it weren’t for Snow’s science, stubbornness, persistence, and passion for the truth, cholera might have raged on for another decade or more, taking thousands or even millions of lives.
Politics is about how we treat one another, how we sustain and share our common spaces and our environment. When people are excluded from politics, they have no say in the common space, no sharing of common resources. People may think of this as benign neglect, but it isn’t benign. It is malignant—and intentional.
No single bad decision or unfortunate event created modern Flint. The greatest forces working against the city were racism and the corporate greed of GM, which pulled out of Flint, the city that birthed and nurtured it, to satisfy financial problems caused by a lack of imagination.
It was real, something that was happening all around us, the blood of our own patients, and water that flowed in the pipes of our own city where we sat. The residents were engaged in a way I’d rarely seen before, vibrating with a weird new energy, tense but invigorated by the feeling that we were finally doing something. And our results weren’t going to be stuffed away in a digital archive and forgotten. Our results could change our world.
I thought about everything he’d been through, largely preventable, all the toxic stresses: violence, fear, bullet wounds, hospital visits, surgeries, and PTSD, and then the effects of lead poisoning. For many people, life isn’t long enough to recover from a childhood like that.
A sea of red tape lay between me and an official health advisory which would hopefully free up resources and qualify the city for bottled water, filters, and other aid.
For the hundredth time, I wondered: Is the official indifference because these are Flint kids? Poor kids? Black kids? Kids who already have every adversity in the world piled up against them?
“Just so you know what’s ahead,” Mark went on, “it could get rough. Many whistle-blowers, even if they’re successful in exposing fraud, have their lives destroyed. […] Many are retaliated against. I have clients who have lost their homes and friends, their marriages destroyed. One even killed himself. That’s why I always counsel new clients—even though they’re doing the right thing—that they need to seriously consider the costs. You have to be prepared for the worst.”
This is what it means to be a member of a family, to have people in your life who trust you and support you and who know you sometimes better than you know yourself. […] What we had was more than love. We understood each other. We were grounded in the same core ideals and morals—and were always moving toward the same goal: to make the world more just, more equitable, and a more human place. To do the right thing, even if it was hard.
What I love most about his story is Nuri’s bravery, persistence, and unfailing loyalty to a borderless progressive cause. He fought for something bigger than a country or a religion, a tribe or an ethnic group. He fought for all people, for humanity, with a hope that there was another way to live.
Down deep, something else was eating away at me. Aeb. It was difficult to describe without using the imprecise word shame. It was not just an Iraqi thing; it was an Arabic thing. It was the idea that you were never acting independently of your family or larger community. You always had a connection to a larger group, and there were always repercussions. If you behaved badly, or strayed even a little bit from the accepted norm, you would bring shame not only upon yourself but on your people. There was nothing worse.
Now, as the press conference loomed, I was beginning to see that my family’s saga of loss and dislocation had given me my fight—my passion and urgency. […] I grew up with dismay and knew how wrong leaders could be, how cruel and negligent. They have to be held accountable, have to be challenged, because power corrupts, and our moral sensibility can be so dulled that we let atrocities happen right around us, unless we manage to stay constantly vigilant, sensitive, aroused, and ready to take a stand.
I was drawing on something deep inside me. Maybe it was the letters my mom received from Haji in Baghdad, or the pictures I’d seen of the gassing of the Kurdish babies. Maybe it was the tenacity and optimism of Mama Evelyn or the strength and integrity of my dissident parents. Maybe it was the inspiration of my heroes, fighters like Alice Hamilton. […] Or maybe there was even something in my DNA, an ancestral inheritance of persistence and rebellion and activism, handed down to me from the generations of prolific scribes who had hoped to keep Nestorian traditions alive, or from Nuri […] with his brave rebellion, or from Paul Shekwana with his passion for public health.
Again and again, the state and federal officials’ disdain for Flint was shocking.
At the EPA, when asked about using federal money to buy water filters for city residents, the Region 5 Water Division chief […] wrote to the regional administrator and others, “I’m not so sure Flint is the community we want to go out on a limb for.”
The pointed cruelty. The arrogance and inhumanity.
Sometimes it is called racism. Sometimes it is called callousness. And sometimes […] it can be called manslaughter.
Flint falls right into the American narrative of cheapening black life. White America may not have seen the common thread between Flint history and these tragedies, but black America saw it immediately. That the blood of African-American children was unnecessarily and callously laced with lead speaks in the same rhythm as Black Lives Matter, a movement also born from the blood of innocent African Americans.
I was just the last piece. The state wouldn’t stop lying until somebody came along to prove that real harm was being done to kids. Then the house of cards fell.
