Federal funding cuts ‘will make us less safe,’ says expert
In a wide-ranging interview with CNN, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Mary Bassett discussed a number of recent public health headlines such as federal funding cuts to scientific research and the potential of another infectious disease pandemic.
Basset is director of the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights, based at Harvard Chan School, and François-Xavier Bagnoud Professor of the Practice of Health and Human Rights. Here are highlights from the March 6 interview:
On federal funding cuts to public health and scientific research:
I think it’s worth taking a step back and reminding ourselves what federal expenditure is every year in the United States. It amounts to something like 6.8 trillion dollars. … In the scheme of things, the percent of the budget that’s spent by … the NIH [National Institutes of Health] or by the CDC [Centers for Disease Prevention and Control] or by USAID [the U.S. Agency for International Development] are really small percentages. … These [cuts] are not really about shaving federal expenditure in a meaningful way. Nonetheless, they’re going to hurt communities here and around the world.
On the invisible nature of public health:
People don’t see the work that we do. They want their food to be safe, their air to be clean. They want to feel confident that they’re going to see a medical provider who’s been appropriately trained. All of these sorts of protections really become visible to us when they don’t work. When they are working, they work silently. … Many people’s livelihoods are engaged in keeping us all safe, and [federal funding] cuts will mean that people lose their jobs. These are people with households and mortgages who spend money in the local economy. … [These cuts] will hurt our economies. [They will] hurt communities. … [They] will also make us less safe.
On the impacts of funding cuts to global health programs:
The reason that we control communicable diseases—these are diseases that can spread from one person to another (measles is an example)—is because [doing so] protects all of us. We live in a very global world, and not having interventions that offer protection for HIV or for TB [tuberculosis] will have an impact on all of us. This is not only about saving lives that we never see. This is also about our security as a nation and keeping us safe in the United States.
On the importance of pandemic preparedness:
It’s not clear that there is a sufficient sense of the importance of advanced planning, and that is absolutely critical to pandemic preparedness. If we’re going to have the capability of responding to avian flu … we have to get ready for it beforehand. So the obliteration of public health structures, dismantlement of advisory committees is … very dangerous.
Watch the CNN interview: Taking a ‘wrecking ball’ to global health: Public health expert on Trump funding cuts
