This paper examines the pandemic as a crisis that exposed the governance of health. It aims to account for the complexity of the relations between knowledge, power, and practices, by exploring how people who play a strategic role in the health and security systems in Switzerland experienced the pandemic and organized the response to it. Drawing on a series of interviews with public health and security representatives, we document three different enactments of the pandemic, as a threat 1. to the health of the population; 2. to the healthcare system; and 3. to society. We show how these enactments shaped the response given to Covid, and how legitimacy to intervene was negotiated in terms of expertise. Serving as a revealing and amplifying factor, the pandemic crisis thus acts as a prism through which the “health” of public health in Switzerland is discussed.