As part of its ongoing war on science, the Trump administration is finalizing what critics call the "Censored Science Rule," a regulation that would restrict health studies the Environmental Protection Agency can use in its scientific work. That has profound implications for things like coronavirus epidemics, and experts are sounding an alarm.
"In the midst of a public health crisis, Americans deserve a government that relies on the best available science to protect everyone against harm," Obama EPA head and president of the Natural Resources Defense Council Gina McCarthy said in a statement. "This proposal does the opposite."
It would restrict the use of health studies to just those than can publish raw data, which in many public health and medical research studies is impossible. And according to a supplemental version to the proposal released this week, it would broaden the scope of the rule to everything that the EPA does, not just the rule-making process. This means even climate change impact researchers would be restricted in the data that they could use. The impact, fully intended by the administration, is to completely eliminate private, anonymized data (patient-identifying information isn’t included) from being considered by the EPA when it evaluates the health impacts of the pollutants it is regulating.
So either these studies have to violate HIPPA privacy laws, or be left out of the decision-making process and be of no broader policy use. Which means the Trump administration can continue on its reckless deregulatory path, making the world we live in even more dangerous to our health.
What that means for things like respiratory epidemics, like what we are surely facing with the coronavirus, is potentially dire. "One of the areas of study that this rule directly impacts is epidemiologists’ work, who study the health effect of certain kinds of threats,” Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Mother Jones. "To the extent EPA would have any regulatory action over something around corona, that information would be precluded because you can't release the [raw medical] data." The hypothetical scenario he gave Mother Jones is this: "Let's say scientists looked at the highest-risk populations facing COVID-19 and wondered if air pollution raised that risk. To take action, the rule would force the EPA only to consider studies that published patients' medical information; any of the studies that don't meet the narrow criteria would go ignored."
That's not how you protect public health. It's not how you do science. It's not how you govern. But it's exactly what Trump does.