Trump’s Policies Are Endangering Your Health
Arnold Korotkin
The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.
President Trump has turned Make America Healthy Again into one of his administration’s signature promises. It is a laudable goal, too. By several measures, the United States is the world’s least healthy high-income country.
As is so often the case with Mr. Trump, however, he has both identified a real problem and enacted a set of policies that will worsen that problem. With public health, the damage could be vast. His administration is rejecting basic medical knowledge and turning back the clock to an era when people were sicker and died sooner.
The administration’s hostility to lifesaving vaccines, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, has already contributed to a rise in measles. Mr. Trump’s cuts to scientific research will forestall future treatments of cancer, heart disease and childhood illnesses. His cuts to Medicaid, which pay for tax breaks for the wealthy, will leave millions of Americans without health insurance and, by extension, health care. His rollback of environmental regulations has allowed corporations to pump more pollution into the air and water, which will contribute to lung diseases and other ailments.
As disappointing as the pre-Trump trends in public health were, Americans remain far healthier than in previous generations. Life expectancy today is almost 80, up from less than 60 a century ago. In that century, we have conquered smallpox and polio. We have cleaned our cities of the smog that was once normal. We have made progress against cancers and cardiovascular diseases that once were death sentences. Mr. Trump and Mr. Kennedy are dismantling the eight decades of work that made that progress possible. There is a great deal to lose.
Here’s what they’re doing:
1. Exposing Americans to preventable diseases
The taming of infectious diseases, including polio, smallpox, measles, mumps, tetanus, influenza and, most recently, Covid-19, has been one of humankind’s greatest achievements. These diseases have all been made far less deadly, and in some cases virtually nonexistent, thanks to vaccines. Mr. Trump himself recently said that vaccines work, “pure and simple.”
Yet as his top health official he has appointed a conspiracist, Mr. Kennedy, who exaggerates or outright lies about the risks that come with these vaccines. Mr. Kennedy has filled an important federal panel, which shapes which vaccines are covered by insurers, with other conspiracists. Republican-led states are following the administration’s lead; Florida is trying to repeal vaccine mandates for schoolchildren.
These misguided changes are already having an effect. The Covid vaccine has become harder to get, even for some vulnerable people. Childhood vaccination rates, which were falling before Mr. Trump returned to office, seem likely to fall further as Mr. Kennedy fans parents’ fears. Already, measles outbreaks have occurred in Texas and elsewhere, and the effects may be far worse in the coming years as society risks losing the herd immunity that it had achieved.
We know about the consequences from these diseases because humanity has lived them. Before vaccines, illnesses like smallpox, measles and polio left people scarred, paralyzed, blind or dead. Many of the victims were children. The Trump administration is condemning more people to suffer and die from diseases that we know how to prevent.
2. Making a future pandemic more deadly
Nobody knows when the next pandemic will arrive. Whenever it does, the United States may be even less prepared than it was for Covid.
With Elon Musk’s help, Mr. Trump this year dismantled the United States Agency for International Development. He also withdrew from the World Health Organization, the global hub for tracking health emergencies, and emptied the White House Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response. These moves may have their biggest effects on poor citizens of other countries who previously benefited from American aid, but they put Americans at risk, too.
Mr. Trump fired the experts and community health workers who once monitored the world for outbreaks and helped restrain those outbreaks before they spread. In the past few decades alone, these workers led the fight against SARS, Zika, Ebola, bird flu and other illnesses, and Americans were largely spared from their effects.
Perhaps the strangest part of Mr. Trump’s health policy is his turn against mRNA vaccines. In his first term, his administration helped make possible the stunningly rapid development of mRNA vaccines for Covid. Mr. Trump could claim mRNA as his greatest accomplishment. Instead, he has caved to vaccine skeptics within the MAGA movement and canceled $500 million in contracts to develop future mRNA vaccines. That will slow the development of treatments for a future pandemic, when every week without a vaccine can lead to thousands of additional deaths.
3. Eliminating future cures
In addition to cutting mRNA funding, the administration has sharply cut medical research funding. Mr. Trump and his aides have justified these cuts by citing government efficiency and the “wokeness” of the universities that conduct much of the research. But science funding represents just 0.6 percent of federal spending, and most medical researchers have little to do with the wokeness wars. Their goal is to find effective treatments.
Without federal funding, much of this research — into cancer, cardiovascular disease, dementia, addiction, diabetes and more — will not happen. It involves basic science that tends to be unprofitable for any one company but can have enormous returns for society. In all, basic research may lose one-third of its federal funding.
Consider the work that a team of researchers at the University of Mississippi and Ohio State University is doing into glioblastoma, a form of brain cancer that is usually deadly within 18 months of diagnosis. The Trump administration cut the team’s funding without a good explanation, forcing the project to pause. After the funding was cut, Eden Tanner, a chemist on the project, received a flood of emails from people affected by the disease. “It’s really heartbreaking to tell them,” she said.
4. Dirtying the air and water
One public-health success story of the past half-century has been the sharp reduction of air and water pollution. As a result of regulations and clean energy breakthroughs, we breathe and drink many fewer toxins than Americans did decades ago. Pollution-related illnesses, like severe asthma, have declined as a result.
This trend may now be over. The Trump administration is hollowing out the Environmental Protection Agency, rolling back regulations, withdrawing support for clean energy and promoting dirty energy that causes illnesses. One example: The administration has given hundreds of industrial facilities a two-year pass on pollution rules. Another example: The J.H. Campbell coal-fired power plant in West Olive, Mich., was on the verge of closing until the Trump administration issued an emergency order, forcing it to stay open — even though the power company had not asked to keep it open. The plant continues to operate today, producing fine particle pollution that is associated with cardiac problems, asthma and other lung diseases.
The effects will be largest in red states, which tend to have more industrial facilities and lighter regulation. In Texas, coal plants are now allowed to release more than twice as much wastewater pollution as they were at the beginning of this year, as well as more than five times as much sulfur dioxide and more than six times as much carbon dioxide, according to the Sierra Club. These changes are also likely to aggravate climate change.
5. Taking away medical care
Mr. Trump’s recently passed domestic policy law will leave 10 million Americans without health insurance, experts estimate. Another 4.2 million could lose health insurance if Republicans in Congress refuse to extend expanded tax credits under the Affordable Care Act. Together, these changes would undo about one-third of the coverage gains from that law.
Without health insurance, millions of Americans will not be able to get crucial medical care. A large recent study concluded that poor adults who received Medicaid were 21 percent less likely to diethan those who were not enrolled. People with insurance are also more likely to be healthy enough to lead happy, productive lives than people without it. Among the biggest victims of the Medicaid cuts, as we recently explained, will be people addicted to opioids — a group Mr. Trump repeatedly promised to help.
The Medicaid cuts exist largely to finance tax cuts for affluent Americans. That same recent law also includes cuts to food stamps, which will leave poor Americans less able to feed their families and almost certainly less healthy. Wealthy Americans who do not need the money nonetheless receive more of it, while lower-income Americans lose food stamps and health coverage.
In each of these areas, it is easy to name ways that our health system has failed many Americans over the past few decades. Insurance is too expensive. Pollution is concentrated in lower-income communities. Cutting-edge medical treatments are sometimes available only to the affluent. Preventive care and chronic diseases receive too little attention from insurers, doctors, scientific researchers and government agencies. Ultraprocessed foods and “overmedicalization” have hurt children, as Mr. Kennedy has noted.
All of which shows the need for a true Make America Healthy Again movement. Mr. Trump is not leading that movement, though. He is instead taking the country backward to a time when many health threats were much more ominous than they are today. Mr. Trump is surrendering America to curable diseases.