Dr. Craig Spencer, a Brown University School of Public Health professor, discusses the greater implications of Elon Musk's DOGE cuts in the health sector.
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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
News from SPH
The moment everything changed
If you ask anyone, they remember the exact moment that they realized that COVID-19 was going to change the world. For most of us, that moment came during the second week of March 2020. Schools were shut down. Many jobs became remote. But by the time most of our lives were changed by the pandemic, public health experts had already spent weeks or even months trying to stop the spread.
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Eight scholars from Brown University looked back at the pandemic with an eye toward how its lessons can help the United States and other nations prepare for the next global health crisis.
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ASIS International
Five Years Later: Security in a Post-COVID World
There are moments where life is divided into a before and an after. Something so significant occurs that it permanently alters the way you perceive the world and yourself in it.
For many of us, 11 March 2020 is one of those moments. That’s the day that the World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared COVID-19 a pandemic.
The stock market plunged, U.S. President Donald Trump banned travel from Europe, and the National Basketball Association (NBA) suspended its season until further notice.
At the same time, security practitioners were working around the clock to put in place measures to protect their employees and organizations. Ahead of the fifth anniversary of the pandemic declaration, Security Management spoke with a range of security and health professionals to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic experience shaped them and what it means for the future of risk management and emergency preparedness.
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Read Article
For many of us, 11 March 2020 is one of those moments. That’s the day that the World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared COVID-19 a pandemic.
The stock market plunged, U.S. President Donald Trump banned travel from Europe, and the National Basketball Association (NBA) suspended its season until further notice.
At the same time, security practitioners were working around the clock to put in place measures to protect their employees and organizations. Ahead of the fifth anniversary of the pandemic declaration, Security Management spoke with a range of security and health professionals to understand how the COVID-19 pandemic experience shaped them and what it means for the future of risk management and emergency preparedness.
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The Atlantic
The Diseases Are Coming
At Donald Trump’s first Cabinet meeting, late last month, Elon Musk sheepishly admitted that DOGE had “accidentally canceled very briefly” Ebola-prevention programs. After a nervous chuckle, he claimed that the oversight had been swiftly corrected. But it wasn’t. The truth is far more disturbing—this administration didn’t just pause a line item; it has actively dismantled the infrastructure the country relies on to detect and confront deadly pathogens.
For more than a decade, I have worked as a physician and public-health expert responding to infectious diseases around the world. In 2014, while treating Ebola patients in Guinea, I contracted and survived Ebola myself. I know how lethal Donald Trump’s assault on America’s outbreak preparedness could be. We are sure to regret it.
DOGE’s slash-and-burn campaign has hit everything from the NIH to the National Weather Service. The cuts to global health, however, are especially alarming. It’s unclear what Musk thought would happen when he fed the U.S. Agency for International Development “into the wood chipper,” as he proclaimed with gleeful indifference on X, the social-media megaphone he owns. Ditto what Trump thought when he withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization and effectively muzzled the CDC. But the result has been that, in little more than a month, America has transformed itself from a preeminent global-health leader into an untrustworthy has-been. Undermining even one of these institutions would have posed a serious threat; gutting them all at once is an invitation for future outbreaks.
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Read Article
For more than a decade, I have worked as a physician and public-health expert responding to infectious diseases around the world. In 2014, while treating Ebola patients in Guinea, I contracted and survived Ebola myself. I know how lethal Donald Trump’s assault on America’s outbreak preparedness could be. We are sure to regret it.
DOGE’s slash-and-burn campaign has hit everything from the NIH to the National Weather Service. The cuts to global health, however, are especially alarming. It’s unclear what Musk thought would happen when he fed the U.S. Agency for International Development “into the wood chipper,” as he proclaimed with gleeful indifference on X, the social-media megaphone he owns. Ditto what Trump thought when he withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization and effectively muzzled the CDC. But the result has been that, in little more than a month, America has transformed itself from a preeminent global-health leader into an untrustworthy has-been. Undermining even one of these institutions would have posed a serious threat; gutting them all at once is an invitation for future outbreaks.
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Brown Daily Herald
Brown professors answer where are we now after five years of COVID-19
Five years ago, the NBA canceled the rest of its season in response to rapidly rising COVID-19 cases. It was then that people began to take COVID-19 seriously, according to Craig Spencer, associate professor of the practice of health services, policy and practice.
Moderated by Director of the Pandemic Center Jennifer Nuzzo, the School of Public Health and Warren Alpert Medical School co-hosted “The Next Global Pandemic: How ready are we?” on March 5. The event commemorated the five-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nuzzo said in an interview with The Herald.
Panelists included Adam Levine, director of the Center for Global Health Equity and the Center for Human Rights & Humanitarian Studies; Theresa Raimondo ’11, an assistant professor of engineering; Scott Rivkees, associate dean for education and professor in the SPH; and Larry Warner ’97 MPH’13, chief impact and equity officer at United Way of Rhode Island.
The event began with an introduction by Spencer, where he shared his experiences working as an emergency medicine doctor at the start of the pandemic.
“It was like walking into the apocalypse,” he said. “Those initial days were dominated by fear and uncertainty.”
In 2020, Rivkees was Florida’s surgeon general. He described how the rain ditches in Florida’s Emergency Operations Center, where he worked, were built to withstand category five hurricanes, but instead of collecting rainwater, the ditches served a different purpose during the pandemic.
“People would literally leave their post-stations, go out and lie in these ditches and would cry, and then they would dust themselves off, and then would come back and do their job,” Rivkees said.
Although five years have passed since the panelists’ experiences, Nuzzo pointed out the importance of applying lessons learned to the future.
For Warner, the COVID-19 pandemic underscored that addressing these crises goes beyond providing vaccines and medical care.
“We also learned about the importance of addressing social needs and how that impacts people's vulnerability to COVID-19 and our ability to connect to resources,” he said.
Strong public health communication is also crucial according to Warner, who said that “society has not been very forgiving” to public health experts for not having “all the answers up front.”
Pandemic-related misinformation was a key issue with public health communication, panelists said.
Levine explained how COVID-19 data dashboards “made the rich countries look like they had been hit” harder than poorer countries, when in reality, countries with higher GDP just had more COVID-19 tests.
“All babies sleep through the night, if only you turn off the monitor,” Levine said. “If you have zero COVID-19 testing sites, then you have zero COVID cases and zero COVID deaths.”
For the panelists, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the relationship between public health and politics.
“If you look over the first 18 months of the pandemic, the biggest risk factor for dying was age,” Rivkees said. “Past 18 months, your biggest risk factor was whether you voted for President Trump.”
Since then, Rivkees said the country has grown “even more polarized.”
Public health PhD student Margaret Dunne GS, who attended the event, agreed with Nuzzo’s point that it is “really important” to reflect on the past to improve the future.
“A million Americans died during the pandemic, and I think it’s on us as public health practitioners and people who care about autonomy that we learn lessons,” Dunne said.
Panelists ended by discussing their predictions for responses to future pandemics.
“COVID is not a one-off,” Nuzzo told The Herald. “It’s behind us, thankfully, but we are going to have to deal with more of these types of events in our future.”
Raimondo took an optimistic stance, pointing out that healthcare professionals have a “much more robust understanding” of advancing vaccines and providing a better “clinical response to patients with different backgrounds” as a result of the pandemic.
But many of the speakers at the event were concerned about government responses to future pandemics, including Nuzzo, who described the current moment as “the luxury of amnesia.”
“We’re at a moment where few people recognize that an outbreak abroad can be an outbreak here, and then there is critical importance in keeping our infrastructure for responding to such outbreaks,” Spencer said. “We are tearing that down actively at this moment, and I promise we will regret it.”
Read Article
Moderated by Director of the Pandemic Center Jennifer Nuzzo, the School of Public Health and Warren Alpert Medical School co-hosted “The Next Global Pandemic: How ready are we?” on March 5. The event commemorated the five-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, Nuzzo said in an interview with The Herald.
Panelists included Adam Levine, director of the Center for Global Health Equity and the Center for Human Rights & Humanitarian Studies; Theresa Raimondo ’11, an assistant professor of engineering; Scott Rivkees, associate dean for education and professor in the SPH; and Larry Warner ’97 MPH’13, chief impact and equity officer at United Way of Rhode Island.
The event began with an introduction by Spencer, where he shared his experiences working as an emergency medicine doctor at the start of the pandemic.
“It was like walking into the apocalypse,” he said. “Those initial days were dominated by fear and uncertainty.”
In 2020, Rivkees was Florida’s surgeon general. He described how the rain ditches in Florida’s Emergency Operations Center, where he worked, were built to withstand category five hurricanes, but instead of collecting rainwater, the ditches served a different purpose during the pandemic.
“People would literally leave their post-stations, go out and lie in these ditches and would cry, and then they would dust themselves off, and then would come back and do their job,” Rivkees said.
Although five years have passed since the panelists’ experiences, Nuzzo pointed out the importance of applying lessons learned to the future.
For Warner, the COVID-19 pandemic underscored that addressing these crises goes beyond providing vaccines and medical care.
“We also learned about the importance of addressing social needs and how that impacts people's vulnerability to COVID-19 and our ability to connect to resources,” he said.
Strong public health communication is also crucial according to Warner, who said that “society has not been very forgiving” to public health experts for not having “all the answers up front.”
Pandemic-related misinformation was a key issue with public health communication, panelists said.
Levine explained how COVID-19 data dashboards “made the rich countries look like they had been hit” harder than poorer countries, when in reality, countries with higher GDP just had more COVID-19 tests.
“All babies sleep through the night, if only you turn off the monitor,” Levine said. “If you have zero COVID-19 testing sites, then you have zero COVID cases and zero COVID deaths.”
For the panelists, the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the relationship between public health and politics.
“If you look over the first 18 months of the pandemic, the biggest risk factor for dying was age,” Rivkees said. “Past 18 months, your biggest risk factor was whether you voted for President Trump.”
Since then, Rivkees said the country has grown “even more polarized.”
Public health PhD student Margaret Dunne GS, who attended the event, agreed with Nuzzo’s point that it is “really important” to reflect on the past to improve the future.
“A million Americans died during the pandemic, and I think it’s on us as public health practitioners and people who care about autonomy that we learn lessons,” Dunne said.
Panelists ended by discussing their predictions for responses to future pandemics.
“COVID is not a one-off,” Nuzzo told The Herald. “It’s behind us, thankfully, but we are going to have to deal with more of these types of events in our future.”
Raimondo took an optimistic stance, pointing out that healthcare professionals have a “much more robust understanding” of advancing vaccines and providing a better “clinical response to patients with different backgrounds” as a result of the pandemic.
But many of the speakers at the event were concerned about government responses to future pandemics, including Nuzzo, who described the current moment as “the luxury of amnesia.”
“We’re at a moment where few people recognize that an outbreak abroad can be an outbreak here, and then there is critical importance in keeping our infrastructure for responding to such outbreaks,” Spencer said. “We are tearing that down actively at this moment, and I promise we will regret it.”