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Once upon a time, public health wasn’t such a dice roll. We took it for granted that our neighbors were all good citizens who got vaccinations to help protect themselves and everyone else. The air we breathed and the water we drank was fairly safe, and we trusted the government to keep it that way. So what happened?
For one thing, public health got politicized at the federal level and is now run by people who can’t see science as a force for good and no longer have your best interests at heart. Some politicians, for example, pretend that climate change doesn’t exist, partly from skepticism and partly because they are being paid to think that way.
Also, there are plenty of former lobbyists turned Donald Trump appointees who are now in charge of your health. They are sidelining scientific evidence in favor of political and industry interests and regulating the very industries they once lobbied for. Big polluters themselves know that science doesn’t lie about the damage they cause, but they have the money to hide findings they don’t like and keep them away from the public.
Health and science writer Alan Burdick puts it this way: “In science, as in a democracy, there’s plenty of room for skepticism and debate. That’s what makes it work. But, at some point, calls for ‘further research’ become disingenuous efforts to obscure inconvenient facts. It’s an old playbook, exploited in the 1960s by the tobacco industry and more recently by fossil-fuel companies.”
Brittany Kelm, a senior policy adviser to President Trump, describes the administration’s approach as “white glove service” for the fossil fuel industry and says she’s part of a “concierge” team assembled to carry out the president’s energy priorities, which include keeping coal plants open (even past their retirement dates), expanding domestic mining, and fast-tracking fossil fuel infrastructure, all while rolling back climate protections.
Aaron Szabo, a former lobbyist whose clients included American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, now works for the EPA and helped set up a system where polluters could get exemptions from Clean Air Act standards by simply emailing EPA and asking for a “presidential exemption.”
Nancy Beck, now with the EPA’s Office of
Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, previously led the American Chemistry Council, which spent millions of dollars lobbying the government and fighting stricter oversight.
Big oil interests spent at least $445 million in the last election cycle to influence Trump and Congress, according to a report from green advocacy group Climate Power. In return, Trump has stymied competition for Big Oil by halting clean energy funding and overturning the EPA’s “endangerment finding” made in 2009 after decades of rigorous scientific research.
The finding underpinned federal standards for the Clean Air Act on vehicle emissions, methane emissions from oil and gas operations and power plant emissions. Now, the EPA has lost a valuable tool to address the actions of these corporate polluters who contribute to climate change and the administration has fired hundreds of scientists who tracked the problems.
Studies have shown that enforcement of the Clean Air Act results in $30 of health and economic benefits for every $1 spent on controlling pollution. But the Trump EPA’s new strategy of systematically erasing the benefits of reducing pollution has also been used to justify its repeal of all climate pollution limits for cars and trucks, as well as its rollback of mercury and air toxicity standards for coal-fired power plants, which will allow more toxic air pollution from mercury and other dangerous chemicals.
Trump’s signature legislative package gave oil and gas firms $18 billion in tax incentives while he rolled back incentives for clean energy alternatives and fast-tracked drilling projects on federal lands. In just his first 100 days in office, Trump took 145 actions to undo environmental rules, all this at a time when most of the world is shifting away from the use of fossil fuels.
Most recently, Trump’s EPA weakened rules governing the safe disposal of ash produced by companies that run coal-fired power plants. These plants often are located on the banks of rivers or other waterways, with waste ash sitting nearby. If not stored properly, the toxic metals and pollutants from the ash leach out into the surrounding waters.
Other public health threats are coming from the government in the form of a scare campaign by vaccine conspiracists, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where facts are now enemies of the state. While the Trump administration can’t erase decades of vaccine science, it seems intent on starving the public of valuable research information.
The CDC just suppressed a study by its own scientists that calculated the effectiveness of covid shots by looking at the vaccination status of people who had sought care at hospitals and emergency rooms. It found that vaccination cut the likelihood of emergency visits due to covid by 50 percent and of hospitalizations by 55 percent, according to a summary of the study viewed by The New York Times.
And nothing says Make America America Healthy again quite like appointing a former tobacco executive to a prominent position at CDC, the very agency tasked with protecting Americans from the consequences of smoking. Stephen Sayle, who worked for Imperial Brands, a British multinational tobacco corporation, moves into the CDC at a time when dozens of staffers working on anti-smoking programs have been dismissed.
Sayle’s appointment seems to fit in with the administration’s goal of dismantling our health institutions and research centers as well as demolishing trust in medicine. “The American Lung Association is deeply dismayed about the administration’s decision to eliminate so much of what is protecting our nation’s kids from the tobacco industry,” says its vice president of national advocacy Erika Sward. “Now there is no one to keep the tobacco industry from flooding the market with its deadly products, and there is no one left at CDC to count how many kids they addict.”
Recently, Trump fired all 22 members of the National Science Board, which funds much of the public scientific research in the U.S. and cut its funding to the lowest level in decades. As usual, the American people will lose out since this kind of fundamental science leads to innovation and new products showing up in the marketplace.
This and similar cuts to science are sounding the alarm. A recent study by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington think tank, warned that without a reversal, the cuts to science could shrink the U.S. economy by $1 trillion over 10 years. That could leave the U.S. lagging behind China, which is investing heavily in research.
The current administration seems to want nothing to do with real science, preferring instead to conjure up stuff when it’s convenient to do so. In spite of what Kennedy says, the U.S. is getting worse at protecting people against the spread of measles because vaccination rates have been falling.
“Public health experts,” the Associated Press writes, “have been critical of Kennedy’s response to the rise in measles cases because, instead of forcefully advocating for more vaccinations, he has been reluctant to promote them, cast doubt on their safety and promote other untested remedies.”
Kennedy’s anti-science crusade also poses a threat to Americans over 65 when common infections–those that grandkids carry around–may snowball into more severe illness and death. Vaccines can ward off viral damage and have other positive side effects. Two doses of the shingles vaccine, for instance, makes older people 50 percent less likely to get a dementia diagnosis within three years. Covid shots reduce seniors’ risk of developing type 2 diabetes, while RSV vaccines are 80 percent effective at preventing blood clots that can lead to heart attacks and strokes.
Kennedy has dropped six vaccines from routine schedules and pulled $1.6 billion from global immunization. Measles, which was eradicated in the U.S. in 2000, now has appeared in 46 states. Three of the six immunizations the CDC says it will no longer routinely recommend–against hepatitis A, hepatitis B and rotavirus–have prevented nearly 2 million hospitalizations and more than 90,000 deaths in the past 30 years, according to the CDC’s own publications.
The campaign against vaccines, led by the very people who are in charge of public health, is baffling. The Miami Herald reports that Florida lawmakers were asked by Republican Gov. Ron Desantis to reconsider a proposal to expand vaccine exemptions for school children just as the state was battling a measles outbreak with 145 cases so far, the fourth-highest number in the nation.
A recent outbreak of measles in Spartanburg County, S.C., a close-knit evangelical community where vaccination rates have fallen in recent years, sickened nearly 1,000 kids, most of them unvaccinated. The outbreak was contained in part because of a vaccination effort led by local clinics, pharmacies and doctors who together administered nearly 4,000 additional doses of the measles, mumps and rubella shot in the county compared with the year before.
A recent piece by The New York Times editorial board headlined “Measles is back. What comes next will be worse,” carried a warning from Alabama’s public health chief Dr. Scott Harris: “Measles is basically a canary in the coal mine for our entire system. When it surges like this, it signals that our vaccination programs are starting to fail, and that other diseases won’t be far behind.”
If you still expect the federal government to provide you with clean air or take care of you in future public health crises, don’t bet your life on it.
Rod Lorenzen is a writer who lives in Little Rock.<\/p>\n
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