The denialism behind the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in India has been aggravated by the invisibility of public health professionals in epidemic response strategies. Indian public health associations were sidelined early on in the outbreak because they demanded responsibility from politicians; primarily, they demanded restraint from assembling crowds at political meetings. India's outbreak response has had a mostly clinical approach. Surveillance, a key public health strategy, was weak, with decision making based on non-systematic data without denominators, and which has minimal use for informing disease control strategies. The Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme was established in India with investment from the World Bank in 2004. Although the goal of this programme was to strengthen disease surveillance, this agency was out of the picture until quite late in the outbreak.A second public health approach, of community engagement and public communication, has also been relegated to the sidelines. Convincing populations to use face masks and implementing physical distancing in the seventh most densely populated country in the world requires an understanding of human behaviours and introducing context-appropriate interventions. The development of human resources with multidisciplinary skills was encouraged in the early 2000s, when considerable public resources went into the establishment of schools of public health in India. These trained human resources are still unused.The outbreak in India highlights the need to separate clinical and public health functions. The Lancet Citizens’ Commission, entrusted to reimagine the Indian health system, could be an excellent platform with which to develop a blueprint for this restructured health system, with interacting yet dichotomous responsibilities that would be better organised to protect its citizens.