It has solely been 5 years, and greater than 1.2 million American deaths, since we had been all locked inside throughout a pandemic that Trump repeatedly stated would merely “go away.”
Now President Donald Trump’s Well being and Human Companies Division, with assist from Elon Musk’s so-called Division of Authorities Effectivity, is slicing COVID-19-related funding for state and native public well being departments by at the least $11.4 billion, they introduced Wednesday in a press release.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” the HHS stated in a press release. “HHS is prioritizing funding tasks that can ship on President Trump’s mandate to handle our power illness epidemic and Make America Wholesome Once more.”
Dr. Céline Gounder, editor-at-large for public well being at KFF Well being Information, instructed CBS Information, “This … is money that had been going to state, local, territorial, tribal health departments across the country, and as we know, as was the case with a lot of COVID funding, it was not just supporting COVID-related programs, but many other things.”
These “other things” embody a spread of efforts, together with wastewater detection methods that monitor rising illnesses in areas like Texas—which has had $877 million in grants canceled by Kennedy and DOGE. Kennedy’s dealing with of the state’s largest outbreak of the measles in 30 years, has been justifiably criticized.
In a press release to NBC Information, Colorado’s Division of Public Well being and Surroundings stated that Kennedy and the HHS’s wholesale price range minimize, “threatens Colorado’s ability to track COVID-19 trends and other emerging diseases, modernize disease data systems, respond to outbreaks, and provide critical immunization access, outreach, and education—leaving communities more vulnerable to future public health crises.”
California Division of Public Well being Director and State Public Well being Officer Dr. Erica Pan elaborated to CBS on how necessary these funds are to public well being.
“This funding helps the general public well being work and knowledge methods improved in the course of the pandemic that helped California fill gaps in its present public well being infrastructure, together with ongoing response to COVID-19 illness and different respiratory and vaccine-preventable illnesses that require comparable assets.”
Further cuts embody a $577 million program devoted to figuring out and creating antiviral medicine for SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, together with six different varieties of viruses with pandemic potential.
Jason McLellan, a structural virologist on the College of Texas, Austin, instructed Nature that the strikes are “clearly shortsighted. To cancel the entire grant because a small portion involved SARS-CoV-2 is going to be dangerous for future pandemic preparedness.”
Kennedy’s place atop our nation’s public well being division is already harmful to our nation’s well-being. His anti-vaccine stances and uncooked milk enthusiasm are unscientific and are already jeopardizing necessary scientific analysis in fields like most cancers therapy and prevention.
The billions in cuts additionally include 1000’s of misplaced jobs, as Trump, Kennedy, and DOGE are demanding big reductions in our public well being system’s workforce and capability. This consists of firing virtually 25% of its full-time workforce and slicing regional workplaces in half.
5 years in the past, virtually to the day, Trump had claimed that COVID would simply “go away” solely six or seven instances. However as The Washington Submit confirmed:
There are an estimated 20 million Individuals affected by a spread of lengthy COVID signs. Researchers have estimated that losses to the workforce from lengthy COVID prices the worldwide financial system round $1 trillion per yr. These cuts will injury the necessary analysis being finished on this area, as there may be nonetheless a lot we don’t know.
However one factor we do know is that COVID has by no means merely “gone away.”
