How will the Trump administration's cuts to state health services affect the nation?

Warshaw:

The U.S Department of Health and Human Services announced yesterday it will cut twelve billion dollars in funding to state health services. This includes funding for tracking infectious diseases such as bird flu or measles. Dr. David Rosner is Professor of  History and Sociomedical Sciences at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University. I asked him about the impact of these cuts on academic research, and on the nation in general.

 Rosner: 

This is devastating. I feel really bad for younger scholars. I feel bad for visiting students. I feel, you know, it's just a horrible situation both for the university, for, uh, for the future of scholarship in general. I mean, we have a lot of student, a lot of faculty who have literally found that their grants have dried up in the, in the middle of, uh, their projects and they have no way of going forward. And they, so it's a, you know, it's gonna have a long term effect. It's gonna be much more than just a short, Uh, short few, few months of suffering and ultimately something like pandemic prevention, you know, for the future of, you know, vaccine research.

Warshaw:

Is this, 'cause a lot of the vaccines obviously for Covid came out of university. You know, I know the AstraZeneca one was founded at Oxford Universe. You know, are we gonna see potentially more pandemics arise in the future as a result of this? 

Rosner:

Well, you can expect that all sorts of research is gonna stop and we are all involved in all sorts of research that are affecting people's lives in all sorts of ways. So, um, yeah, of course it's going to affect us. Uh, sooner or later we'll come back to bite us. 

Warshaw:

And Trump claims, you know, we don't need to fund Covid because the pandemic is over. Something like pandemic prevention, is it a constant ongoing thing that you always need to be tracking behind the scenes?

Rosner:

Listen, you know, at School of Public Health where part of my appointments at the School of Public Health, uh, there are people who spend their lives literally tracking disease. I mean, literally going around the world, going to hotspots, finding out where disease outbreaks are occurring, trying to prevent the spread of those diseases. Um, and without, without support for them, if they're, uh, we'll find that there are going to be outbreaks here. 

Warshaw:

Does funding for things like pandemic prevention epidemics, can it come from anywhere else besides the government? 

Rosner:

No. Any action around pandemics means you have to deal with entire populations.

You have to deal with the world. That's what pandemic means, and that the only agency you really have to deal with that is our, our governments. The government's working together, you know? 'cause unfortunately, bacteria and viruses do not respect borders. They don't respect, they don't respect, uh, you know, the border between, uh, you know, New York and New Jersey. They go over bridges. 

Warshaw:

And would you be able to speak to, you know, the rise of people not vaccinating for measles and kind of how that will affect future generations of generations of children?

Rosner:

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's literally. Unbelievable to me that we have people who believe deeply or, or anti-vaccination.

This, I mean, it's just unbelievable. Vaccination has probably been the one technological tool that we developed in the last century, century and a half really, um, that has changed the outcome of millions of lives. I mean, so the idea that we have somehow forgotten that lesson and are willing to go back to it and you know, we have a head of the national, you know, of the, you know, the health infrastructure of this country who doesn't believe in vaccination. It's just, uh, is terrifying for a public health person. It's just terrifying for anyone who knows anything about health and disease. 

Warshaw:

And if someone was to say, well, we could use the funding elsewhere, you know, in, you know, we could use it to fund cancer research, you know, diseases that are currently here as opposed to prevention. What would you say to know that kind of argument? 

Rosner:

The reason why we have cancer research and reason why we worry about cancer is because we spent literally decades, centuries trying to deal with infectious disease. 

Warshaw

Thank you so much, Dr. David Rosner. I really appreciate you coming to speak with me today.

Rosner:

My pleasure. Bye-bye.