|
June 30, 2025 
|
|
|
 | By Alexandra Sifferlin Health and Science Editor, Opinion |
|
It’s been a relentless few months in health and science news: sweeping funding cuts, the firing of federal health workers, the reshuffling of a crucial vaccine advisory panel and more. But what does it all add up to?
In a guest essay today, Dr. Steven Woolf, a physician and researcher, offers a stark answer: “The poor health of Americans is about to get worse.”
Woolf worked alongside one of my colleagues, the Opinion graphics editor Taylor Maggiacomo, who spent weeks combing through grants and programs canceled by the Department of Health and Human Services to visualize what’s been lost. Woolf connects these cuts to broader shifts — the weakening of vaccine policy, the hollowing out of health agencies, the ending of mental health supports for children, the relaxation of limits on dangerous pollution — and argues that the forecast is bleak for a country that already trails its peers in life expectancy.
All the more striking, then, that the man leading this hobbled system, the health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has built his platform around the promise to “Make America Healthy Again.” As Woolf writes, “The administration is kneecapping the very infrastructure that would make that feasible and is instead enacting policies that will compromise health.”
Woolf’s essay is ultimately a call for action — by his peers in health care, leaders of independent medical associations, any person who doesn’t want science to contract or health care to become less accessible. But it’s also a reminder of what Americans, from the public to its leaders, are taking for granted and the risks of assuming that the systems that protect us and create new cures will always be there.
Read the guest essay:
Here’s what we’re focusing on today:
