It's not the "established" definition with the target audience. Your argument is basically "I don't speak Spanish, so I'll talk louder and add a long 'o" at the end of words when talking to someone who only speaks Spanish."

It's hard to find a public health organization that doesn't say that communicating with the public is a key goal and core competency.

So, are they: [1] Incompetent [2] Using a different definition of "goal", "communicating", "core competency", etc? [3] ????

Note that communications isn't the only problem.

One of the arguments for [1] is that the public health folk have long said "hey, we're necessary to avoid a repeat of the Spanish Flu." yet they were largely unprepared. (Then again, flu kills 30-80k Americans every year and most of the good transmission research was done in the late 40s...)