The Trump administration deliberately harnessed racism and class animosity to push policies that caused hundreds of thousands of U.S. deaths, according to a scathing new report in the British medical journal The Lancet.
After undertaking a comprehensive assessment of the health and environment impacts of Donald Trump’s presidency, the 33 scientists who co-authored the article estimated that rollbacks of environmental and workplace protections led to 22,000 excess deaths in 2019 alone. They also found that 40% of U.S. deaths during 2020 from Covid-19 would have been avoided if the country’s death rate had been closer to that of its G7 peers, and blamed Trump for eschewing the advice of public health agencies and politicizing common sense responses to the pandemic such as mask-wearing.
The findings rely on comparisons with previous U.S. norms and those in other countries to make statistical assumptions about what mortality rates might have been if Trump hadn’t swerved away from the global scientific consensus. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and epidemiologist at Boston College who was one of the report’s co-authors, argued that it was fair to make the linkage.
“Basically, the Trump administration stopped enforcing Clean Air Act,” Landrigan said, referring to the landmark legislation signed by President Richard Nixon in 1970 and used by President Barack Obama to regulate carbon emissions. Under the aegis of ending the “war on coal,” Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency reversed the Obama administration’s emissions rule and stopped trying to control fine particulate matter air pollution. As a result, the Lancet report said, concentrations of such pollution have increased after having declined steadily for decades before he took office.
Fine particulate pollution is closely linked to all sorts of lethal diseases, including childhood asthma, heart disease, lung cancer, and diabetes among adults.
“We see trend lines for deaths from environmental and occupational exposure start going up in 2017, reversing 50 years of decline,” Landrigan concluded. “It is hard to walk away from cause and effect.”
Trump’s last EPA Administrator, Scott Wheeler, repeatedly cited cost benefit analysis as a rationale for regulatory changes that undermined Obama-era attempts to curb pollution. On the campaign trail last year, the former president pledged to ensure that the U.S. had the “cleanest air and water in the planet,” even as his administration reversed policies created to achieve those goals. Representatives for Trump didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Lancet’s willingness to wade into the politics behind health policy is highly unusual among scientific journals. Richard Horton, the journal’s editor, is no stranger to controversy, however. Under his leadership, the magazine has come under fire for one-sided critiques of Israel, for assigning greatly inflated death figures to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and for publishing a now widely discredited study linking vaccinations to autism. In April, the Lancet criticized Trump for pulling out of the World Health Organization, calling his decision a “crime against humanity.”