{"id":17401,"date":"2022-01-25T15:54:39","date_gmt":"2022-01-25T15:54:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-news\/?p=17401"},"modified":"2026-02-27T22:24:21","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T22:24:21","slug":"global-health-pro-goes-local","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/2022\/01\/global-health-pro-goes-local\/","title":{"rendered":"Global Health Pro Goes Local"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Kate Havelin ’83 \/ Photo by Theresa Scarbrough<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a disaster responder, Mark Jackson \u201907 has hopscotched the globe. His wanderlust and sense of urgency to help in crises have taken him from Haiti and the Philippines to East Timor and Afghanistan. Since April 2020, Jackson has focused on fighting the pandemic in Minnesota\u2014working for Saint Paul-Ramsey County Public Health, leading COVID-19 testing and vaccination programs in Minnesota\u2019s second most populous county.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jackson\u2019s scientific training and international experiences guide his approach to COVID-19\u2019s surges and setbacks. He was born in Kenya and spent two years in Liberia while his parents served in the Peace Corps; later, his family moved to Minnetonka, Minnesota, where he graduated from high school. At Mac, he majored in biology and considered medical school but didn\u2019t want to commit to living in one place for several years. Instead, he worked in labs, including the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, studying Parkinson\u2019s disease, and in Madison, Wisconsin, studying gene sequencing in cervical cancer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When a 7.0-magnitude earthquake slammed Haiti in 2010, Jackson left his lab work to jump into direct action. He joined actor Sean Penn\u2019s volunteer group at a makeshift hospital. Jackson quickly realized that a medical certificate would boost his effectiveness, so he flew to Wyoming for an intensive six-week emergency medical technician training at the National Outdoor Leadership School. Then he jetted back to Port-au-Prince to oversee emergency patient transports. \u201cThat\u2019s the thing,\u201d he says. \u201cWhatever needs to be done, just figure it out.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a few more international assignments, Jackson enrolled in a one-year graduate program at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, earning a master\u2019s in global health. The week before his November 2013 graduation ceremony, Typhoon Haiyan swept across the Philippines. Within hours, the Minneapolis-based American Refugee Committee called Jackson asking if he could help. The next day, Jackson and the rest of the rapid response team flew to the island nation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He ended up working a year in the Philippines, mostly on contract with the World Health Organization. For months, he co-led a team tasked with finding, recovering, and, when possible, identifying more than six thousand typhoon victims buried in rubble and mass graves. He learned to tread carefully between rival powers\u2014the Aquino administration and Imelda Marcos\u2019s powerful family. \u201cMixing politics and health never works,\u201d Jackson says. \u201cWe learned this right off the bat in the Philippines that anything related to politics can interfere with lifesaving work and care.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By year\u2019s end, Jackson was burnt out. Back in the United States, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, when he leaves disaster assignments, he takes time to take care of himself\u2014at a Nevada cowboy ranch, \u201ca pretty perfect place to disconnect and unwind.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jackson\u2019s next WHO assignment was in East Timor, where he and five doctors spent several months organizing a measles, rubella, and polio immunization campaign. Then, in three weeks, the team inoculated five hundred thousand children under the age of fourteen\u2014approximately 40 percent of the population. \u201cWomen would come over the mountain on horseback with their kids to get them vaccinated,\u201d Jackson says. \u201cThey understood they had to get their kids protected.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When COVID-19 halted Jackson\u2019s next planned international posting, he landed his Ramsey County job the same way he found many international postings\u2014\u201cAll my jobs can be connected back to Mac, seemingly,\u201d he says with a laugh. A classmate, Dr. Blair Brown \u201907, called Jackson to talk about her work to create a new isolation and quarantine unit for people with COVID-19 who didn\u2019t have a place to live. Within the week, Jackson was on the job, working with Brown to launch Ramsey County\u2019s respite shelter for people experiencing homelessness, the first and now only program of its kind in Minnesota.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since then, Jackson has continued to work for the city and the county, coordinating more than 20,000 COVID-19 tests in drive-through parking lot sites, the State Fair horse barn, and many other locations, often amid snow and rain. By last fall, Jackson was promoted to planning manager for a longer-term position with Saint Paul-Ramsey County Public Health and will continue as director of COVID-19 testing and vaccination support. Since January 2021, his team has administered around seventy thousand doses of vaccine at 450 clinics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His overseas experiences contrast with the vaccine hesitancy he has encountered in the US. \u201cComing from an international perspective, it is almost embarrassing that we\u2019re having to convince people to get the vaccine with enticements like lottery tickets,\u201d says Jackson. \u201cOverseas, you have significant barriers to getting vaccinated against COVID-19, and the line is long for that. That\u2019s the most disturbing thing about what\u2019s going on in the US right now. Most people in lower-income countries would kill for some of the access we take for granted to these mRNA vaccines\u2014any vaccine against COVID.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jackson delayed his own COVID-19 shot to get it in front of hesitant shelter workers, a persuasive strategy he learned with WHO. He devotes much of his time talking individually to people doubtful about the vaccine. \u201cTrust is the main currency that we need these days,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At age 37, Jackson considers his first completely full passport one of his most valuable possessions. He hasn\u2019t plotted his next move but figures eventually he\u2019ll do long-range disaster planning\u2014and expects to always be open to the next call for help. \u201cFor me, it\u2019s just instinctual,\u201d Jackson says. \u201cMixing a sense of adventure with helping people: I can\u2019t ask for anything more.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kate Havelin \u201983 is a freelance writer in Minneapolis.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The COVID-19 crisis drove disaster responder Mark Jackson \u201907 back to lead Ramsey County testing and vaccine efforts<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1077,"featured_media":17457,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17401","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","mediatype-articles"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"fields":{"article_type":[8],"flickr_photoset_id":"","youtube_id":"","square_thumbnail":false,"press_photos":false,"story_title":"","story_caption":"","rotations":false,"maps":false,"marker_title":"","marker_text":"","geographic_location":false,"feature_embed":"","custom_link_url":"","news_icon_name":"","image_options":false,"main_feature_story":"","custom_image":false,"custom_feature_title":"","custom_feature_caption":"","custom_markup":"","custom_markup_link":"","custom_markup_title":"","custom_markup_caption":"","byline":"","post_thumbnail_style":"default","press_downloads":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1077"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17401"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17401\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30695,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17401\/revisions\/30695"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}