A 2008 poll of American historians in which 107 of 109 rated the presidency of George W. Bush a failure, and in which 61% rated it the
worst ever in U.S. history, doesn’t begin to provide an accurate picture of how bad the Bush presidency was. That presidency was filled with so much blatant corruption and crime that it is hard to know where to begin to describe how bad it was. If the
willful demise of public health during the Bush presidency was the only black mark against it, that alone would have been enough to characterize it as a dismal failure.
The demise of public health during the Bush presidency was no accident. Public health represents everything that the Bush presidency stood against: It involves community action to keep Americans healthy utilizing policies which individuals cannot perform on their own; though it works for everyone, it disproportionately works for the more vulnerable members of our society; it can cut into profit margins of wealthy corporations; and, it relies on science as its primary guide to action.
Obstructing public health related to the 9/11 attacks Since Bush administration propaganda touts its greatest accomplishment as keeping us safe for seven years – even though it allowed the first major attack on the continental United States
in 187 years – their response to the 9/11 attacks is a good place to start in documenting their contempt for public health and safety.
David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz point out in an article titled “
Katrina Started at Ground Zero” that the only aspect of government that worked on 9/11 was the public health response to the attacks. The Bush administration hadn’t yet had enough time to dismantle our public health system:
The President was flying haplessly around the country looking distinctly unpresidential; … The military couldn't scramble armed jets and anything else that could go wrong did. But one thing worked, and it worked splendidly -- the New York City, as well as federal, public-health system.
While the World Trade Center was burning fiercely… public health officials were already mobilizing. Within hours, hospitals had readied themselves to receive the injured; hundreds of ambulances were lined up… the city's public health department had opened its headquarters to receive hundreds of people stricken by smoke inhalation, heart attacks, or just pure terror; the Department of Health had already begun providing gas masks and other protective equipment to doctors, evacuation personnel, and first responders of all sorts….The federal Centers for Disease Control readied immense plane-loads of emergency supplies…
But then the Bush administration began to take over:
It took no time at all for the administration to start systematically undercutting the efforts of experienced health administrators in New York and at the national Centers for Disease Control. By pressing them to return the city to "normal" and feeding them doctored information about dust levels… the administration lied to support a national policy of denial… City officials were told by administration emissaries that, despite the pall hanging over Ground Zero, all was well with the air and water in lower Manhattan and normal life should resume… Although nearly the entire city could, for months to come, smell the rancid co-mingling of burning plastics, asbestos, lead, chromium, mercury, vinyl chloride, benzene, and scores of other toxic materials… Bush's appointees in the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) continually bombarded city officials with
reports claiming that the air was certifiably "safe" to breathe. The Board of Education, feeling the heat from… Washington, ordered schools just a few blocks from Ground Zero reopened and thousands of students were sent back to the neighborhood.
The authors note the intense skepticism of NYC residents, journalists and
scientists regarding Bush administration
official pronouncements on the subject. And then:
As it happened, they were all correct in their fears.
Class action lawsuits from over 7,000 residents and workers subsequently led to the discovery of documents showing how intense pressure from Mayor Giuliani had indeed led the Department of Health to certify areas in lower Manhattan safe so that they could be reopened for residents and business.
Perhaps the issue with the greatest potential for catastrophic public health consequences is global warming. An
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that of 928 scientific peer reviewed articles on climate change, not a single one disagreed with the scientific consensus view that global warming is produced by greenhouse gases due to industrial activities, is highly likely to have catastrophic effects on the world population, and can be mitigated only by changing the industrial causes of the production of greenhouse gases.
Yet George Bush responded to this threat by denying that it is a major problem, making the United States one of two countries in the world that has
refused to participate in the Kyoto protocol for reducing the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, and by
silencing the top climate expert at NASA, Dr. Jim Hansen, who has called for “prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming”:
The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming… The fresh efforts to quiet him, Dr. Hansen said, began in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth "a different planet."
First rise in infant mortality rate in 44 yearsInfant mortality rate is often cited as an
excellent indicator of the state of public health of a nation or community, because public health activities have been shown to exert a pronounced effect on it. Prior to George Bush being selected as president in 2000 the United States had experienced tremendous declines in infant mortality, with a continuing steady decline since 1958 and a
three-fold decrease since 1970.
Then, in 2002 the United States experienced its
first increase in infant mortality since 1958 (It has
remained approximately constant since that time). The close timing of this unfortunate occurrence with the presidency of George W. Bush was no accident. As
explained by Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association (APHA), potential reasons for the surprising turnaround in infant mortality in this country include: “women receiving less prenatal care or losing their jobs, cuts to nutrition programs, and climbing poverty rates”.
Corruption at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)In October 2008, whistleblowers at FDA
wrote to Congress about rampant corruption there:
Serious misconduct by managers of the FDA at the Center for (medical) Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH) is interfering with our responsibility to ensure the safety and effectiveness of medical devices for the American public and with FDA's mission to protect and promote the health of all Americans.
There is extensive documentary evidence that managers at CDRH have corrupted and interfered with the scientific review of medical devices…. While managers can disagree with FDA experts, they cannot (legally, that is) order, force or otherwise coerce FDA experts to change their scientific judgments, opinions, conclusions or recommendations. Managers at CDRH with no scientific or medical expertise in medical devices, or any clinical experience in the practice of medicine have ignored serious safety and effectiveness concerns of FDA experts…
To avoid accountability, these managers at CDRH have ordered, intimidated and coerced FDA experts to modify their scientific reviews, conclusions and recommendations in violation of the law…
These accusations of whistleblowers are substantiated by a
poll of FDA scientists conducted by The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER):
The results paint a picture of a troubled agency: hundreds of scientists reported significant interference with the FDA's scientific work, compromising the agency's ability to fulfill its mission of protecting public health and safety.
Dr. Sidney Wolfe, of Public Citizen, had this to say about FDA corruption during
an interview (Scroll down to “Can the FDA Protect the Public”) with Amy Goodman:
We did a survey of FDA physicians, the physicians who review new drug applications. … They identified 27 drugs that they thought were too dangerous to be approved, but which were approved over their objection. They identified 14 instances where they were told not to present information adverse to a drug at a public FDA advisory committee hearing because it might prejudice the advisory committee against the drug. Not to mention that the drug company at the same hearing does everything to prejudice the committee in favor of a drug….
And I have personally experienced this corruption myself, as an FDA scientist who has worked at the FDA for 9 years: In 2004, I wrote a scientific article about a medical device whose purpose was to prevent the rupture of aortic aneurysms, a highly fatal event. The article, which reflected poorly on the device, was submitted to and accepted for publication by a widely read medical journal. But the manufacturer of the device found out about it just before it was due to be published, and they demanded of FDA Commissioner
Lester Crawford that the article be withdrawn. Dr. Crawford complied with the manufacturer’s demands. Consequently, someone leaked the story to the
Wall Street Journal, where it appeared on their
front page.
Gross negligence in response to Hurricane KatrinaOne of the most obvious failures of public health by the Bush administration concerns its lack of preparation for and response to Hurricane Katrina. Despite recommendations from its own Army Core of Engineers that the New Orleans levees could not withstand a major hurricane, the Bush administration
decided not to repair them. Then, despite adequate warnings, George Bush sat around and
partied rather than initiate an evacuation or rescue plan for the people of New Orleans, while hundreds or thousands of potentially preventable deaths were occurring. And when he finally got around to coming to New Orleans he ordered rescue workers to pose with him for a
photo-op rather than commence with the urgently needed rescue of hurricane victims.
Following Katrina disaster, there was much that the federal government could have done to protect the public health of the citizens of New Orleans and elsewhere who had been victimized by the Bush administration’s negligent response to Katrina. Instead, it did as little as possible. A study sponsored by the Children’s Health Fund, titled: “
Legacy of Shame: The Ongoing Public Health Disaster of Children Struggling in Post-Katrina Louisiana”, sums up the consequences of the Bush administration failure to deal with the problem:
The on-going recovery is continuing to fail in ways that are clearly harmful to the health and well-being of children and their families. At this point, many storm dislocated families have endured two and a half years of crowded, formaldehyde-laden travel trailers as shelter followed by lives in limbo scattered unmonitored in low-income housing and shelters from motels to travel trailers in still devastated communities… It is clear from our review of the medical records of 261 children being cared for in Children’s Health Fund’s project… the sickest of the 20,000 or more children still displaced in Mississippi and Louisiana… (that) persistent neglect of the health and nutrition of highly vulnerable children and the lack of a plan to ameliorate this reality is having a devastating effect on the health and well being of Katrina’s youngest on-going victims.
Obstruction of AIDS preventionAIDS is likely to be the worst epidemic in the history of the world, predicted to reach 100 million world-wide
deaths by 2020. Probably the best public health measure to prevent AIDS is education on the use of condoms. The Bush administration has not only refused to promote this, but it has actually
actively obstructed its own scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from continuing this crucial preventive measure.
Refusing to fund research using embryonic stem cellsResearch using
embryonic stem cells has the potential to produce major advancements on a number of public health fronts. Yet, in order to pander to his religious base, George Bush refused to fund this research, even going so far as to use his first
presidential veto.
The excuse for this veto was highly disingenuous. In the photo accompanying the article of Bush’s veto, he is holding a baby who was adopted as an embryo, the implication being that funding of embryonic stem cell research may have resulted in the baby’s sacrifice to research. Such an implication has no basis in reality, since all of the embryos used in embryonic stem cell research are ones which otherwise would have been destroyed.
The gutting of our Civil ServiceSince the
Pendleton Act in 1883, and until the Bush administration, almost all of our nation’s public health functions were performed by personnel under our Civil Service system. There are several mechanisms by which this system facilitates effective public health actions: Personnel in this system are professionally trained in public health and generally dedicated to their profession, through long years of training and experience. Because there is no profit motive, they are free and motivated to protect the public health, rather than search for ways to cut corners so as to increase profits. Because their jobs are protected by Civil Service laws, they are able to build up a great amount of public health experience, and they are free to follow the dictates of their consciences, rather than give in to political pressure to politicize their jobs.
That all changed greatly under the Bush presidency. An article in
The Nation by Dan Zegart, titled “
The Gutting of the Civil Service” explains how the gutting of our Civil Service by the Bush administration politicized public health to the great detriment of the American people. The article begins by describing a hospital that accidentally transfused some patients with a wrong blood type, resulting in a death and some near deaths. FDA investigators recommended that a warning letter be sent to the hospital, but they were over-ruled by higher ups who thought that that would be too harsh, claiming “there was no evidence of systemic problems.” The article goes on to describe how the above example fits in with the anti-consumer, pro-corporation stance taken by the FDA (and other public health agencies) under George W. Bush:
The decision was far from surprising. Over the past five years warning letters have become an endangered species at the FDA. According to a recent report by Representative Henry Waxman, the number of such letters issued under Bush-appointed FDA chief counsel Dan Troy plummeted from 1,154 in 2000 to 535 in 2005. Seizures of mislabeled, defective or dangerous products, another key measure of enforcement activity, dipped 44 percent. Waxman's investigators found a disturbing pattern of laissez-faire managers over-ruling field agents trying to discipline wrongdoers – even when deaths had resulted.
Summing up the destruction of public health by the Bush administrationRosner and Markowitz sum up the utter contempt and hostility with which the Bush administration treated public health for eight long years:
Such
public-health basics as laboratories, well-baby clinic care, and inoculation campaigns were quietly drained of money badly needed for a war-gone-wrong in Iraq. Administration cronies with no particular skills or experience in emergency management were put in charge of FEMA and on scientific panels at the Centers for Disease Control… The public health community saw its sanest initiatives stifled and its priorities distorted. While money is
now less available for the inoculation of babies from the real threats of rubella, mumps, and measles, as hoped-for funds to prevent as many as 350,000 children from getting lead poisoning are no longer on anyone's agenda, as federal funds to support health education have been rescinded, and as (unbelievably enough) money needed to protect U.S. ports from dirty bombs or bioterrorism have all-but-vanished, Katrina victims still wander the nation wondering whether they will be able to see a physician.
Too bad this kind of information was not publicized better during the Bush years. A robust public health system characterizes a government that cares about its people. The American people are highly favorably predisposed to a robust public health system, as demonstrated by a
2008 opinion poll that shows: 75% of Americans favor increasing federal funding for state and local health departments (page 17); only 12% consider funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) not to be a priority (page 16), and 81% agree that our health care system should be redesigned to encourage illness prevention (page 16).
Yet the Bush administration’s vast and willful failures in public health were barely publicized to the American people, like so many other failures of the Bush administration. If our country is to avoid further calamitous presidencies of this sort it is imperative that the American people have a better understanding of what happened and how it happened. An excellent way to do that would be to have thorough well publicized investigations into the myriad scandals and crimes of the Bush administration.
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