The Trump administration deliberately used racism and class activism to push policies that caused hundreds of thousands of U.S. deaths, according to a scathing new report in the British medical journal The Lancet.
After a comprehensive assessment of the presidential health and environmental impacts of Donald Trump, the 33 scientists who co-authored the article estimated that 22% of environmental and workplace protections resulted in an additional 22,000 deaths in 2019 only. They also found that 40% of U.S. deaths in 2020 from Covid-19 would have been avoided if the country’s death rate had been closer to that of their G7 counterparts, and blamed Trump for dispelling the advice of public health agencies and the politics of sensible responses. . to the pandemic as a mask wear.
The findings rely on comparisons with previous U.S. norms and those in other countries to make statistical assumptions about the mortality rates that would exist if Trump had not moved away from the global scientific consensus. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and epidemiologist at Boston College who was one of the co-authors of the report, argued it was fair to make the connection.
“Basically, the Trump administration stopped enforcing the Clean Air Act,” Landrigan said, referring to the landmark legislation signed by President Richard Nixon in 1970 and used President Barack Obama to Control Carbon Emissions Under the guise of ending the “coal war,” the Trump Environmental Protection Agency rejected the Obama administration’s emissions regulation and stopped trying to control fine air pollution. As a result, the Lancet report said, concentrations of such pollution have risen after declining steadily for decades before taking office.
Granular pollution is closely linked to all sorts of deadly diseases, including childhood asthma, heart disease, lung cancer, and adult diabetes.
“We are seeing trend lines for deaths from environmental and occupational exposure starting to go up in 2017, going back 50 years of decline,” Landrigan recalled. “It’s hard to walk away from cause and effect.”
Trump’s last EPA Administrator Scott Wheeler again cited cost-benefit analysis as a rationale for regulatory changes that reversed Obama-era efforts to prevent corruption. On the trail of the campaign last year, the former president promised to ensure the “cleanest air and water on the planet at the U.S.,” even when his administration reversed past policies. created to achieve these goals. Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Lancet’s willingness to get into politics behind health policy is quite unusual among scientific journals. Richard Horton, the magazine’s editor, is not a controversy, however. Under his leadership, the magazine has caught fire for one-sided critics of Israel, for highlighting death figures that have been sharply reduced in the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, and for publish a study that is now widely suspected linking vaccines to autism. In April, Lancet criticized Trump for withdrawing from the World Health Organization, saying his decision was a “crime against humanity.”
But the fact that so many scientists were willing to break away from their traditional political neutrality to name this assessment is “a sign of a changing time,” according to Gretchen Goldman, director of research at Union of Concerned Scientists. While the Lancet has been more musical than others, she said, he is not alone among science magazines in publicly criticizing Trump. Scientific America surprised many when it broke 175 years of tradition and gave Joe Biden his first primary support, largely because he argued that Trump was such a terrible choice.
“If you told me four years ago that scientific journals would speak out against Trump, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Goldman said. “But since then, there has been a shift, showing both how badly Trump did as well as the willingness of the scientific community to engage in policy negotiations. “
This report has its roots in the spring of 2017, when the Lancet established a commission of experts with a background in a wide range of subjects such as clinical medicine, public health, and epidemiology to monitor for effects. public health Trump administration.
In terms of environmental policy, the report noted that Trump reversed 84 important rules covering everything from toxins in water to the way scientific research is used by the federal government, with 20 other rule changes still in progress by the end of his term. The increase caused by airborne contaminants was the main cause of the additional deaths, the authors recalled. But they also suggested that rejecting Trump’s climate change would be the most enduring stain on his environmental heritage.
While the Commission ousted Trump, he also acknowledged that a deep-seated problem in the American health system had affected him for decades. The authors note, for example, that America’s life expectancy rates have been declining compared to other high-income countries since the 1980s.
But instead of moving to address this decline, the report argues that the former president was used primarily by the anger of white, low- and middle-income people over what was their intention to shift the racial vitality and senoffobia that fueled his political success. Those who supported Trump were indeed among the worst affected by his policies, the Commission found. The 22,000 additional 2019 deaths occurred largely in states that voted for Trump, while Democratic states such as California and New York had their own laws that were a safety net.
The report also highlights the racial differences in health that grew under Trump, noting that the majority of the 2.3 million were a minority Americans who lost health insurance while in office. He also confirmed that Covid-19 has had a greater impact on blacks, Latinx and Native Americans.
Mary T. Bassett, former health commissioner for New York City and a member of Lancet’s panel of experts, wrote in a statement released by the report: ” direct long-term racial equality. they were not addressed. “