Gabriella Stern details the challenge of fighting geopolitical scapegoating and false narratives amid America’s abrupt exit from the WHO at the latest Public Health in Practice Seminar.
Read Article
Pandemic Center
Craig Spencer, M.D., MPH
Associate Professor of the Practice of Health Services, Policy and Practice at the Brown University School of Public Health
Biography
Dr. Spencer is an emergency medicine physician and an Associate Professor of the Practice of Health Services, Policy and Practice at Brown University School of Public Health. As a physician he focuses on frontline preparedness, both in the U.S. and globally, especially on the impact of COVID-19 on health systems. This includes the real world impact of pandemic preparedness – or lack of preparedness – for clinicians and patients, particularly from a humanitarian perspective.
An advocate for equitable access to medical countermeasures, diagnostics, and treatment, he also explores the historical foundations for the COVID response, based on the response to previous pandemics. He brings to the Pandemic Center a unique understanding of the current operational level of pandemic preparedness and response, the scope of which includes providers, patients, and frontline readiness, locally, nationally, and globally.
Recent News
As I stepped into line to pick up my badge for the Children’s Health Defense (CHD) conference last weekend in Austin, Texas, a gregarious man approached holding two tall plastic tubes he said contained “clots” from Covid vaccinated bodies. After 36 years in the Air Force, he told me, he’d been pushed out for refusing the shot. Now in retirement, he calls funeral homes and surveys undertakers to document alleged vaccine harms.
Read Article
It’s Election Day in parts of the country, so we thought it was time to talk politics.
Dr. Craig Spencer, from Brown University’s School of Public Health, penned a Substack last week that stopped us cold. In it, he makes a bold case that public health needs to get more political—not partisan, but political in the sense of organizing, mobilizing, and demanding what people say they value: cleaner air, safer food, prevention that actually gets funded.
It’s a striking call at a moment of profound change — what some call a reimagining, others a dismantling — of public health itself. But if you look at the polling across Republicans, Democrats, and the MAHA “curious,” there’s surprising common ground right in public health’s wheelhouse.
It’s time, Spencer argues, for public health to step into the political arena to fight for change or watch the system unravel.
Read Article
Dr. Craig Spencer, from Brown University’s School of Public Health, penned a Substack last week that stopped us cold. In it, he makes a bold case that public health needs to get more political—not partisan, but political in the sense of organizing, mobilizing, and demanding what people say they value: cleaner air, safer food, prevention that actually gets funded.
It’s a striking call at a moment of profound change — what some call a reimagining, others a dismantling — of public health itself. But if you look at the polling across Republicans, Democrats, and the MAHA “curious,” there’s surprising common ground right in public health’s wheelhouse.
It’s time, Spencer argues, for public health to step into the political arena to fight for change or watch the system unravel.
Before he set foot in 200 Independence Avenue, Washington DC, Robert F Kennedy Jr, US president Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services, had raised more than a few eyebrows from America’s medical establishment. Around 17,000, to be precise – that’s how many doctors signed a letter from the Committee to Protect Health Care urging senators to reject his nomination, saying he was “unqualified to lead” and was “actively dangerous”.
Their petition failed. Today, Kennedy Jr, better known as RFK, is head of an agency with an almost two trillion-dollar budget and a little over 80,000 employees. On Monday, speaking from the White House, Trump and the US secretary of health and human services said women should not take acetaminophen, also known by the brand name Tylenol, “during the entire pregnancy.” It was announced that the Food and Drug Administration would begin notifying doctors that the use of acetaminophen “can be associated” with an increased risk of autism, but neither Trump or Kennedy Jr provided any peer reviewed medical evidence to support this. They also raised unfounded concerns about vaccines contributing to rising rates of autism.
---
Read Article
Their petition failed. Today, Kennedy Jr, better known as RFK, is head of an agency with an almost two trillion-dollar budget and a little over 80,000 employees. On Monday, speaking from the White House, Trump and the US secretary of health and human services said women should not take acetaminophen, also known by the brand name Tylenol, “during the entire pregnancy.” It was announced that the Food and Drug Administration would begin notifying doctors that the use of acetaminophen “can be associated” with an increased risk of autism, but neither Trump or Kennedy Jr provided any peer reviewed medical evidence to support this. They also raised unfounded concerns about vaccines contributing to rising rates of autism.
---
NPR: All Things Considered
An emergency room doctor describes what the changes at the CDC could mean for public health
The Trump Administration has made significant changes to the departments in charge of public health. Dr. Craig Spencer, an emergency medicine physician who teaches public health policy at Brown University, discusses the impact he expects on the health of average Americans and for the future of public health research.
---
Read Article
---
The White House’s AI Action Plan, released in July, mentions “health care” only three times. But it is one of the most consequential health policies of the second Trump administration. Its sweeping ambitions for AI—rolling back safeguards, fast-tracking “private-sector-led innovation,” and banning “ideological dogmas such as DEI”—will have long-term consequences for how medicine is practiced, how public health is governed, and who gets left behind.
Read Article