March 13, 2025
Provided Image/Kyle Cassidy
An exhibition commemorating five years of the COVID-19 pandemic at Mütter Museum will include photos of Philadelphia nurses taken by local photographer Kyle Cassidy. Above, a photo taken by Cassidy of an ICU nurse named Margaret, who treated COVID patients in the Philly area.
A new long-term exhibition at the Mütter Museum will look back on how Philadelphia's health care workers sprung into action five years ago when the COVID-19 pandemic began, and the huge toll it has continued to take on their mental health ever since.
"Trusted Messengers" will be on display at the museum from Saturday, March 15, through Feb. 2, 2026. Along with exploring mental health effects on front-line workers through a series of photos and interviews by West Philly-based photographer Kyle Cassidy, the special exhibition also delves into the city's response to the pandemic, including vaccine development at Penn’s Weissman Lab and how public health officials used materials like flyers and street art to spread the latest information and try to cut through the noise of falsehoods and distrust — which continues to be an issue even half a decade after the pandemic started.
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"The exhibition, the idea of it, it's really meant to be a commemoration of this five-year anniversary, but I would say more so a celebration of the resilience of Philadelphians and of our health care workers and first responders," said Kate Quinn, executive director of the Mütter Museum. "... I think we're starting to see those stories bubble up about, 'Remember when?' So we want to be part of that conversation and to be able to celebrate what it was that did move forward successfully during one of the darkest times in recent history."
Resilience is on full display in the pictures taken by Cassidy, who launched his ongoing project to photograph and interview nurses working during COVID in March 2020 shortly after the city shut down. He said he realized the world was divided into two groups, those who could help solve the pandemic and people who could only "sit home and watch Netflix." As a photographer, Cassidy recognized one thing that he could do to take action was to share the stories of those who were out on the front lines.
Cassidy said he embarked on a project that he calls an "oral history," helping nurses share their stories with "people who needed to hear them," such as those who were ignoring stay-at-home orders and other directions from health officials. He's been working with about 25 subjects who he's kept in touch with for the past five years. Some of them, he's been photographing each year on the same day, while others he's been doing yearly follow-up interviews to see how they've been holding up.
The mental health struggles of nurses who worked during the pandemic are well-documented. Research published last year by the National Library of Medicine found that nurses caring for COVID patients experienced higher levels of stress, burnout, anxiety, depression and frustration compared with other health care workers. Cassidy's photos and stories capture this firsthand.
"None of these COVID nurses are OK, and none of them will ever be OK again," Cassidy said. "The damage that they went through is going to last for the rest of their lives. The mental health issues that they have are going to be forever, and that manifested very early on."
Cassidy recalls one nurse he interviewed on Christmas Eve 2020 whose phone kept buzzing as the hospital she worked for kept offering higher and higher pay to get nurses to come in for extra shifts. At one point, the incentive bumped all the way up to $200 on top of her regular pay. She didn't take them up on the offer, though.
"It was just so terrible to be there, and the only thing that a lot of the hospitals could do was offer more money because they couldn't offer less work," Cassidy said.
Other harrowing stories he heard came from a nurse in a small hospital who said she and her coworkers cleared out a closet where they could go take breaks and cry during their shifts. Another nurse remembered being in a quiet room where all she could hear was her breathing, the doctor's breathing and the "very labored" breathing of a person suffering from COVID as he took his last breaths. There was also the nurse who told Cassidy she spent days and weeks taking care of COVID patients in an intensive care unit, only for none of them to survive.
Cassidy noted a story told by first responders at 9/11, who would hide in the rubble so the "terribly depressed" search dogs would feel like they found survivors.
"You can't do that with the nurse and say, 'Oh, the patient lived.' They have to deal with that every day," Cassidy said. "And then at the same time, they're terribly worried that they're going to get their family sick."
Cassidy said that when he launched his project, he was sure that health care workers were the "trusted messengers" of society. But as time went on and conspiracy theories ran rampant, he realized there are many people who have a "legitimate mistrust" of the medical community and who prefer to get their news from their barber, their religious leader, their parent or friend. He hopes the health care industry will figure out the best ways to "meet people in their spaces" and get legitimate health messaging to them. His biggest aim with his photographs, though, is to show the people who have sacrificed their own mental health and well-being to help others the past five years.
"What I want people to get out of seeing my pictures is how much horror some people went through to keep us alive," he said.
Cassidy has been working on finding a publisher for a book with his photos and interviews with nurses. There will be a booklet available for visitors to "Trusted Messengers" to flip through.
The "ethos" of the Mütter's "Trusted Messengers" exhibition, according to Quinn, is to shed a light on the community groups that did trust the health care system throughout the pandemic, and who made an effort to share vaccination and protocol information with their friends, families and neighbors who had a "strong distrust" for what they were hearing from the government. The idea for "Trusted Messengers" came after Quinn visited a similar exhibition at the David J. Sencer CDC Museum in Atlanta in 2023.
"I thought it was a really powerful way to expand your understanding of who and what provided messages to you and about information during the pandemic," Quinn said. "Who did you trust and what happens with folks who are in marginalized communities when their trust of medical establishments wasn't as clear?"
The Mütter Museum worked with the CDC Museum and Philadelphia community groups involved in pandemic work to customize it for Philly visitors. Some parts of the Atlanta exhibition will be on display, including videos that highlight teen voices. There will also be more localized pieces, such as augmented reality posters, street art and informational flyers in a dozen languages that were used in Philly initiatives to encourage COVID safety and vaccination. One of the "capstone pieces" of the Mütter's display, according to senior director of interpretation and engagement Sara Ray, will be objects from the Weissman Lab used in the development of mRNA technology for Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccines.
"(We) really show how that was a Philadelphia story," Ray said.
Over the next year, Mütter will run a series of programs to accompany "Trusted Messengers" to help audiences engage with the messages in a "deeper way," according to Ray. The museum will partner with Philly organizations to run workshops on relevant topics like media literacy when it comes to health information shared online.
"We're talking about 'trusted messengers' in the really acute situation of COVID-19, but we really want to use programming as a way to encourage people to think about how this is a much more pervasive topic," Ray said. "When I'm scrolling through Instagram, I also still need those media literacy skills to understand the types of health advice that I'm getting there. So we're looking to partner with (local organizations) to teach us about how to gain those skills of communication for yourself so you can be a trusted messenger to your own community and also sort of parse the information that you're getting."
The "Trusted Messengers" exhibition will be included with Mütter Museum admission, which can be purchased online.
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