America's Public Health Decline Is Just Getting Started: Canada Should Prepare For Influx Of MDs, Scientists

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The impending return of Donald Trump to the White House seems likely to collapse American health science, with consequences as disastrous for the rest of the world as for the approximately 340 million Americans in the U.S. Canada may be able to soften the impact here, but it will not be easy. An alarm went out early in December from The Lancet, probably the best medical journal in the world. In a special issue dedicated to U.S. public health under the second Trump administration, one journal article described the impact of American expertise on the rest of the world. It’s an impressive achievement: victories against yellow fever and polio, HIV-AIDS and malaria, maternal and infant mortality, tuberculosis — not eradicated like smallpox, but greatly reduced.

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Given Trump’s statements and recent appointments to health-leadership positions, however, few if any of these subjects will get serious attention. Health equity and climate change will assuredly be non-starters in Trump’s administration. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, is a famous advocate against vaccines. He has said that on Jan. 20, 2025, the day of Trump’s inauguration, he will fire 600 employees at the National Institutes of Health, and replace them the next day with 600 new people who will shift NIH’s focus from infectious diseases to diseases like obesity. “We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years,” Kennedy reportedly told an anti-vaccine group.

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Now imagine the consequences when not 600 but scores of thousands of health scientists find their research at the mercy of Trump’s nominees. Think of the graduate students, many from overseas, who will be unable to continue their studies as research funds vanish or move to other fields. What will they do, and where will they go? Many will start looking to the Government of Canada’s website on how to immigrate, hoping to find jobs in universities or provincial or federal public health. They would be an astounding windfall of talent, with a precedent.

In 1957, the University of British Columbia welcomed the Hungarian Sopron Division of Forestry — 14 faculty members and 200 students, refugees from the 1956 Soviet crackdown on Hungary. We paid their travel costs and provided accommodation, English lessons and financial aid to students and faculty alike, for five years. Many stayed and built careers here. That kind of ambitious acquisition is likely beyond any modern Canadian university’s (or government’s) ability. But by recruiting individuals and laboratories, universities and health agencies could greatly strengthen their research capabilities, attract new students and research funding, and thereby improve the health of Canadians and other people around the world.

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https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2024/12/19/America-Public-Health-Breakdown/