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Dear Friends of the Cornell K. Lisa Yang Center for Wildlife Health,
I am recently back from one of our profession’s most important conferences, the annual meeting of the Wildlife Disease Association (WDA). It’s of course always good to catch-up with colleagues, and I was very pleased to see how many Cornell alums were at the meeting (and the photo below may well not have captured all of them!), and to note that our relatively young Cornell K. Lisa Yang Center for Wildlife Health is more and more playing a leadership role in our field, whether it comes to applied research, training the next generation of wildlife and One Health professionals, or moving our science into policy and action. I think many of us were also painfully aware that this meeting, with its theme of building communities to promote collaboration and communication for change, comes at a critical time, with science and public health, among other key societal pillars, under assault by our federal government.
The U.S. is in crisis on so many fronts right now, but here I want to focus on our (for lack of a better word) surrender when it comes to downstream preparedness for future pandemics. Many of you were reading our newsletters back during the COVID-19 lockdown, and you may remember the “preventing pandemics” webinar we hosted with WWF and special guests Tom Friedman and Jane Goodall, amongst others. What gave me a glimmer of hope throughout those years was that we would emerge from that horrible period better prepared to avert such tragic mortality and morbidity, such extraordinary social and economic chaos. Today, at least in the U.S., that appears not to be the case. Just in the past month, we’ve seen, among many, many other actions to dismantle what were the world’s leading public health and science agencies, an abandonment of the one technological advancement that saved millions and millions of us from death and debilitating illness during the pandemic—mRNA vaccines.
On August 5th, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in an announcement that was full of lies about mRNA vaccines, canceled $500 million worth of investments meant to protect Americans from future disease outbreaks. This comes on top of Kennedy’s cancellation of $766 million in contracts with the vaccine manufacturer Moderna, meant to prepare us for a potential influenza pandemic in the face of the current outbreak of avian influenza that has impacted poultry and (for the first time ever) cattle across the U.S.—and more than 50 species of mammals overall! I urge you to read my June editorial, The U.S. Must Invest in mRNA Vaccines against Pandemic Influenza Viruses Now, and then decide for yourself if our government is meeting its obligations to protect your health and safety—the most basic task any national government should be focusing on. For those of us who have devoted scientific careers to trying to address some of the world's most critical challenges, it’s important not to normalize what are shocking and dangerous decisions that the majority of Americans oppose.
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