December, 07 2017, 02:00pm EDT
Doctors, Nurses Weigh In: Federal Budget Threatens Our Health
WASHINGTON
As the U.S. Congress reaches its deadline to pass government spending bills, Environment America released a letter from hundreds of health professionals urging their representatives to oppose any attempts to cut funding or protections for our environment and health.
More than 300 doctors, nurses, and public health experts warned that:
"The proposed budgets set dramatically low levels of funding for several programs that protect our environment and our health. These cuts and the harmful rollbacks to environmental protections will result in dirtier air and water, sicker families, and fewer protections for our public lands."
In addition to detrimental funding cuts to the EPA including enforcement and clean water programs, the letter opposes several legislative provisions in current Congressional proposals that would:
- Delay life-saving smog standards for 10 years, preventing Americans from even having the right to know if the air they breathe is unhealthy and severely delaying cleanup steps,
- Remove protections for the drinking water sources for 1 in 3 Americans,
- Attack clean car standards that are already cutting pollution,
- Obstruct states' ability to regulate industrial factory farms, endangering drinking water sources, and
- Undermine climate science and programs that would cut global warming pollution.
"We don't want more kids getting sick from smog, sewage, and sludge." said Morgan Folger with Environment America. "Americans need a budget that gets a clean bill of health from our most trusted experts. 300+ health professionals urge Congress to craft and support a budget that will lead us to a cleaner, greener, healthier future that is free of harmful anti-environmental provisions."
With Environment America, you protect the places that all of us love and promote core environmental values, such as clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and clean energy to power our lives. We're a national network of 29 state environmental groups with members and supporters in every state. Together, we focus on timely, targeted action that wins tangible improvements in the quality of our environment and our lives.
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Sanders Seeks Public Input for Long Covid Moonshot Legislation
"The time is long overdue for Congress to treat long Covid as the public health emergency that it is," said the Senate HELP Committee chair.
Apr 09, 2024
"As chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, it is my strong belief that the crisis of long Covid is a public health emergency that we can no longer ignore."
That's how U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) began a Tuesday letter inviting public comment on a $10 billion bill he is crafting to address the crisis of at least 22 million Americans enduring chronic or relapsing symptoms after a Covid-19 infection.
"In January 2024, the HELP Committee held a hearing on the topic of long Covid where experts underscored the urgent need to aggressively find approved treatments for this terrible disease, to better educate medical professionals on how to diagnose long Covid, to better understand the risks associated with long Covid, and to identify potential therapeutic options, among many other things," notes the letter.
We cannot ignore the public health crisis that is Long COVID. On Long COVID Awareness Day, let us commit to doing everything we can to address this horrible condition. The U.S. government must do more to increase awareness and provide additional resources to develop treatments. pic.twitter.com/OLnRkhivm7
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) March 15, 2024
"Before getting Covid-19 in Los Angeles in March 2020, I was a runner for nearly two decades," Angela Meriquez Vazquez, a long Covid patient and former president of Body Politic, told the panel. "What started as a mild illness progressed over weeks with an increasingly scary set of symptoms, including severe levels of blood clots, a series of mini-strokes, brain swelling, seizures, painful heart palpitations, severe shortness of breath, extreme confusion, and numbness in my face, hands, and legs that progressed to an inability to walk for several days, and new onset of allergic anaphylaxis after every meal."
"We are living through what is likely to be the largest mass disabling event in modern history," she warned. "Not since the emergence of the AIDS pandemic has there been such an imperative for large-scale change in healthcare, public health, and inequitable structures that bring exceptional risks of illness, suffering, disability, and mortality."
Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in Saint Louis and one of the experts who testified earlier this year, pointed out that there are no medications approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treating the condition and "the ongoing and planned trials for long Covid are too slow and too small (i.e. underpowered) to provide definitive answers."
"We developed vaccines at warp speed. We are doing trials for long Covid at snail speed," the doctor said. "We don't go through an earthquake without dealing with its aftermath. We cannot live through the biggest pandemic of our lives without dealing with the aftermath."
Sanders' proposed legislation would provide a decade of mandatory funding to help the National Institutes of Health respond to the crisis. At the NIH, the bill would create a centralized coordinating entity for research activities, establish an advisory board, and require the federal agency to launch a new grant process for clinical trials as well as a database "for the storage and dissemination of de-identified patient data to make long Covid research more accessible."
The bill would also "require federal entities to provide continued education and support to patients, providers, and the public about the ongoing risks of long Covid, as well as how to identify and address it," explains the letter, which has an addendum detailing the plan.
The committee is accepting emailed feedback on the proposal at LongCovidComments@help.senate.gov through April 23.
Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) has released a #LongCovid Moonshot Legislative Proposal calling for $10b in research funding!!\n\nThis is thanks to so much advocacy from patients & allies \ud83d\udc93 Immense gratitude to @LisaAMcCorkell @patientled @lcmoonshot @MichaelPelusoMD & the community!— (@)
"In my view, the time is long overdue for Congress to treat long Covid as the public health emergency that it is," Sanders said in a statement. "Congress must act now to ensure a treatment is found for this terrible disease that affects millions of Americans and their families."
Sanders, a longtime advocate of ensuring everyone in the nation has healthcare by passing Medicare for All legislation, stressed that "far too many patients with long Covid have struggled to get their symptoms taken seriously. Far too many medical professionals have either dismissed or misdiagnosed their health problems."
"That has got to change," he asserted. "We cannot turn our backs on the millions of Americans who continue to suffer from long Covid. I look forward to hearing from patients, experts, and researchers about what we must do to address this crisis."
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'Victory for Cleaner Air' as Federal Court Upholds California Vehicle Emissions Standards
"This ruling ensures that the 17 other states that follow California can keep driving towards a future with cleaner air and cleaner vehicles," said one advocate.
Apr 09, 2024
Three judges serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Tuesday affirmed the Biden administration's 2022 decision to preserve California's strict emissions standards—dealing a blow to a coalition of right-wing state attorneys general and fossil fuel industry groups that had challenged the rules.
The panel—made up of judges who were appointed by Democratic Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama—ruled that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was right to reinstate its waiver, dating back to the 1970s, which allows California to impose stricter emissions standards than the federal government.
The waiver, which has helped the massive state to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by hundreds of thousands of tons annually, was introduced to help the state address smog stemming from congested freeways and roads in Los Angeles.
The Trump administration revoked the exception in 2018, and Biden reinstated it in 2022, a move that one Sierra Club leader said was "vital to California" and would have a "positive ripple effect on states across the country, driving forward climate progress and delivering cleaner air for millions of Americans."
On Tuesday, Sierra Club senior attorney Joshua Berman said the D.C. Circuit panel's ruling in Ohio v. EPA was "a victory for cleaner air and cleaner cars not just in California, but across the nation."
"The D.C. Circuit has reaffirmed California;s critical role in protecting its residents from harmful vehicle emissions, thereby benefiting the many states that rely on adoption of California's standards to achieve and maintain the Clean Air Act's air quality mandate," said Berman.
California's strict emissions standards have been adopted by 17 states and Washington, D.C. since they were first introduced. The Biden administration recently approved new emissions standards for cars as well as buses and trucks that campaigners and experts said were progress but didn't go far enough.
Alice Henderson, director and lead counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, said the upheld standards "will save lives, protect people from the climate crisis and unhealthy air pollution, save drivers money, and help create good new jobs."
Scott Hochberg, transportation attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute, which intervened in Ohio v. EPA in support of California's waiver, called on the state to now "go full speed ahead with strong car standards."
"This year California should continue to show national leadership on clean vehicles by adopting ambitious new standards for gas-powered cars, pickups, and SUVs," said Hochberg. "Importantly, this ruling ensures that the 17 other states that follow California can keep driving towards a future with cleaner air and cleaner vehicles."
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Arizona Supreme Court Upholds 1864 Abortion Ban—But Voters Will Get 'Ultimate Say' in November
"Arizona is what happens when abortion policy is, as Donald Trump claims he wishes, left up to the states," said one columnist.
Apr 09, 2024
Reproductive justice campaigners in Arizona on Tuesday vowed to make sure voters "have the ultimate say" on abortion rights after the state Supreme Court upheld an 1864 ban that includes no exceptions for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest.
"This is a horrifying ruling that puts the lives and futures of countless Arizonans at risk," said Leah Greenberg, co-founder of progressive advocacy group Indivisible. "It's devastating and cruel—and we're fighting back."
The court ruled that since Roe v. Wade was overturned by the right-wing majority on the U.S. Supreme Court in 2022, no law exists to prevent Arizona from reinstating a measure passed in 1864—before Arizona was even a U.S. state.
The law outlaws abortion care from the moment of conception with exceptions only in cases of a pregnant person who faces life-threatening health impacts. Such "exceptions" have been shown to threaten the health, including reproductive health and future fertility, of pregnant people in several states since Roe was overturned in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling.
Under the Arizona law, doctors who are prosecuted for providing abortion care could face fines and 2-5 years in prison.
State Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, called the ruling "unconscionable and an affront to freedom."
"Today's decision to reimpose a law from a time when Arizona wasn't a state, the Civil War was raging, and women couldn't even vote will go down in history as a stain on our state," said Mayes. "This is far from the end of the debate on reproductive freedom, and I look forward to the people of Arizona having their say in the matter. And let me be completely clear, as long as I am attorney general, no woman or doctor will be prosecuted under this draconian law in this state."
Democratic organizer Amanda Litman noted that local prosecutors "have jurisdiction to decide whether or not to press charges on people seeking care under this ban."
Last week, organizers with Arizona for Abortion Access announced that they had collected more than the number of signatures needed to support placing a referendum on a constitutional amendment enshrining the right to abortion care on state ballots in November.
The ruling was handed down in Planned Parenthood v. Hazelrigg, a case that centered on an anti-abortion doctor's appeal of a December 2022 ruling which upheld the state's 15-week abortion ban. Dr. Eric Hazelrigg, who owns a chain of anti-abortion clinics in the state, urged the high court to instead reinstate the 1864 ban.
Planned Parenthood Arizona, Inc. said the "deplorable decision will send Arizona back nearly 150 years."
"This ruling will cause long-lasting, detrimental harms for our communities," said the group. "It strips Arizonans of their bodily autonomy and bans abortion in nearly all scenarios. And it does so following the troubling example of the U.S. Supreme Court in Dobbs: with judges ignoring long-settled precedent and principles of law to reach their preferred policy result."
Columnist Helaine Olen noted that the ruling was handed down a day after former President Donald Trump, now the Republican Party's presumptive 2024 presidential nominee, said states should be allowed to impose "whatever they decide" in terms of abortion restrictions and bans.
"Remember," said U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). "This is brought to you by Trump. He supports cruel bans like these, and he made them possible by overturning Roe."
The ruling was put on hold for 14 days, and advocates emphasized on Tuesday that abortion care is still legal in Arizona for the time being.
Since Roe was overturned, pro-forced pregnancy legislators in Wisconsin and Michigan have supported imposing abortion bans dating back to 1849 and 1931, respectively. A judge ruled last July in Wisconsin that the 19th-century law did not make abortion care illegal, and Michigan voters approved a constitutional amendment protection abortion rights, clearing the way for the 1931 law to be repealed.
Voters in Florida, where the state Supreme Court last week effectively approved a six-week abortion ban, will also vote on a constitutional amendment on abortion rights in November.
Since 2022, voters in states including Kansas and Kentucky have voted in favor of expanding, rather than restricting, access to abortion.
"With abortion on the ballot in November, anti-choice extremists will feel the power of pissed off women voters," said Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.). "No doubt about it."
Kari Lake, the Republican Senate candidate in Arizona, quickly attempted to distance herself from the 1864 ban, saying she was calling on the state Legislature to "come up with an immediate commonsense solution that Arizonans can support."
U.S. Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), who is running against Lake, noted that just two years ago after Roe was overturned, the former TV newscaster and gubernatorial candidate said she was "incredibly thrilled that we are going to have a great law that's already on the books... It will prohibit abortion in Arizona except to save the life of a mother."
"This November," said Gallego, "Kari Lake will find out, yet again, that Arizonans have no interest in politicians who threaten their rights."
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