Jonathan Rockoff
Appearances
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
A lot of this comes from this criticism of the pandemic response and how overarching the public health response to the pandemic was. And this feeling that because the public health authorities sort of overstepped their authority, we need to rein it back again. We see this most saliently in vaccines. There's a lot of criticism on the right about mandating vaccines and things like that.
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
And so a lot of the cuts have been targeted at vaccines in particular.
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
We already see right now that no matter who's in charge, that there are going to be public health threats and that whoever is in charge is going to have to deal with them. Right now, we're seeing this measles outbreak in the Southwest and then some other states. And we're also dealing with bird flu. So these threats remain. I think part of what the Trump administration and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
are doing is sort of rethinking what the balance should be. And as Betsy has sort of laid out, I think there's a... There's a different sense of what we should invest our preventative resources in and whether that should be in something like HIV or whether it should be in chronic diseases.
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
Well, it's a little unclear. He's definitely been out front about how he thinks we need to do more to prevent chronic diseases. But we haven't necessarily seen a lot of specifics around how he would do that. So that's TBD. What we have seen is skepticism about vaccines and about some of the other sort of infectious disease prevention efforts. And then we see Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
himself using mixed descriptions of the efficacy and safety of the vaccines and agencies in HHS beginning efforts to take a look at the safety and efficacy of the vaccines, even though most researchers say that's already been settled and that vaccines are really good and they prevent diseases like measles and they don't cause autism.
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
One other thing to note here is the other sort of early tangible impact that we're seeing in the public health, healthcare spaces and research there's been cuts to NIH and other funding of medical research.
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
So for the last generation, a lot of the progress that we've seen against serious diseases like cancer has started in government-funded academic laboratories, which have found the causes of the diseases insights that lead to drugs to treat those diseases. And what may happen, but we aren't sure yet, is that that sort of link between government funding and academic advances may be broken.
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
This gets at the underlying debate. We've been doing things for the past generation a certain way, but there's no reason why we have to do them that way. And I think the Trump administration, to its credit, is taking a hard look at how we've been doing things. And the government has been this huge funder of medical research.
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
But philanthropies have also funded medical research, and pharmaceutical companies and other health care companies have also funded research. And perhaps with the Trump administration's prodding, that will get rejiggered and we'll see a different amount of life sciences industry funding of academic labs, for instance. What people say in the academic world, for instance, is...
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
That without that government funding, we might not see a lot of the basic research that has led to advances against cancer, against high cholesterol, against other diseases, because there needs to be sort of a minimum level of government funding of basic research before industry and philanthropy is willing to step in.
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
USAID was sort of the epitome of the United States' exercise of soft power internationally. It didn't have direct benefit to the United States. It didn't help us erase trade deficits or ink trade deals or have any sort of direct benefit. And the Trump administration has completely rethought that approach.
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
We've grown comfortable with a United States where measles hasn't run rampant, where there isn't polio, where we're not dealing with tuberculosis outbreaks all over, where children are drinking fluoridated water and avoiding a lot of cavities and tooth decay.
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
There are, as we've discussed, reasons why we would want to take a look at how we've done all these infectious disease and other public health efforts in the United States and whether the mix of federal and state funding for those efforts needs to change and whether philanthropies and industry needs to step up more.
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
But what public health folks argue we don't want to do is to go back to a place where the threat of polio was prevalent, where we are dealing with measles outbreaks spreading around the country, where we are seeing more and more people developing HIV-AIDS. And so the worry that they have is...
WSJ What’s News
Inside the Biggest U.S. Public Health Shakeup in Modern History
While we take a look at how we've done public health for a generation, are we going to go back to the place that we thought we had left behind?