Betsy McKay
Appearances
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
Yeah, John is absolutely right. We are at the tail end of a very bruising pandemic, very bruising to public health in the sense that there was a lot of anger and backlash, and that remains, and the view that government was not efficient. More broadly speaking, the administration says chronic diseases are worsening and changes need to be made. So there's two things here.
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
There are the philosophical changes. They view a smaller, more effective government and more focused on chronic diseases. then there is the immediate impact of the changes being made suddenly and the disruption that that causes.
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
Yeah, absolutely. Because when you disrupt a public health program or any health program, you are going to have consequences, if not immediately, certainly down the line. You know, an important part of fighting HIV is not treating people already infected with HIV, but preventing people from getting it, giving them access to pre-exposure prophylaxis, education, many other programs.
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
And most of them seem to be targeted for cuts.
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
Yeah, it's another rethink. The State Department and the administration have said there's a lot of waste in our funding. We're funding a lot of things around the world. We need to rethink this and we need to reevaluate exactly what we want to fund. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
Some of the health programs that USAID funded will be continued, but they must qualify as serving American interests, which is a pretty broad definition.
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
Well, it's difficult to understand what that model would be right now. Certainly every country that has lost money, I mean, some African countries are heavily, heavily dependent on donors abroad. They have two things they're looking at. One, how much money can they themselves put up?
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
Many of these countries are servicing a lot of debt and so don't have as many funds as are needed to keep everybody on HIV prophylaxis or to combat tuberculosis in the way that they need to. The second thing is, can they find other donors abroad? The US has been a leader, not only in giving most of the governmental funds and pulled other countries along with it.
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
We're going to give this much money. How about you step up too? With that gone, there's less incentive. So it's a real problem. The goal has always been to help these countries ultimately become independent. But what global health advocates argue is we're just not there yet. Global health leaders have a lot of concerns about HIV, tuberculosis, and other infectious diseases resurging.
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
And while that would happen in other countries, it matters to us because, as we saw from the pandemic, we live in a global world. Anything that... starts in Africa, Southeast Asia, wherever, can come to us very quickly. And so that's a really big reason why we have helped build up health systems and surveillance capabilities around the world.