SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
More than 12,000 public health leaders and researchers are kicking off a meeting this weekend in Washington, D.C., to face what they see as a crisis in their field.
GEORGES BENJAMIN: I think public health is under attack by our own federal government more than anything else.
DETROW: They're coming together to discuss how to counter what they see as dangerous ideas coming from the Make America Healthy Again movement. NPR's Pien Huang has this report on what's at stake.
PIEN HUANG, BYLINE: Dr. Georges Benjamin has led the American Public Health Association for almost 25 years, and he's very worried about how the Trump administration has cut staff and funding for public health.
BENJAMIN: They're undermining the core systems that we have for people to get good, solid medical care in our country.
HUANG: Benjamin says White House policies are also interrupting the pipeline for doctors and nurses and making it harder to import drugs and new technologies.
BENJAMIN: They are totally destroyed, the modern health system as we know today.
HUANG: So the American Public Health Association is meeting this upcoming week to defend their vision for America's health. They're up against forces like the Make America Healthy Again movement, led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Mark Gorton is co-president of the MAHA Institute think tank, which aims to influence federal policies and launched earlier this year. He says what they're about is...
MARK GORTON: Cleaning up the corruption in the health system, restoring the integrity of the public health and medical systems.
HUANG: And he wants to see some of the existing systems go away.
GORTON: It's not that I am saying we should utterly destroy public health, but we need to recenter it around truth.
HUANG: In his opinion, the U.S. health system is, quote, "a fear machine to market pharmaceutical products."
Is it your perspective, actually, that, like, you know, if we stopped fluoridating water, stopped vaccinating people, just as two examples, like, everyone would be fine and better off?
GORTON: Yes. You would have a healthier population without those things.
HUANG: Gorton is not a medical doctor. He's the founder of the tech company LimeWire. He also started a hedge fund, and he's been a big supporter of Secretary Kennedy - or Bobby, as he calls him - for years. Doctor Benjamin, again with the American Public Health Association, says Gorton's critique of public health is misinformed.
BENJAMIN: And the reason that most of us are alive long enough to be able to complain about public health is because of public health.
HUANG: He notes that public health has saved millions of people from early deaths through sanitation, vaccination and discouraging unhealthy behaviors like smoking. Dr. Carmen Nevarez is a longtime public health leader. She sees the MAHA movement as a reaction.
CARMEN NEVAREZ: MAHA doesn't come out of nowhere. You know, it comes out of people's lived realities. It comes out of circumstances where they felt that something was not addressed correctly.
HUANG: Health care costs are high in this country. The COVID pandemic here were hard and isolating for many people. She hears the criticism and hopes to find common ground, but it's a challenge, she says, because there is a key difference in the public health approach.
NEVAREZ: There's times when you have to say, sorry, you're not just a danger to yourself. You're a danger to others, and that's why we are going to limit your freedom.
HUANG: Like forcing someone with tuberculosis to get treated so they don't infect others, or shutting a restaurant with an active rat problem.
NEVAREZ: If you live alone in an island, this is not your problem. If you live with neighbors and people in a city with you, it's your problem.
HUANG: At the coming meeting, public health leaders will rally for their own vision for protecting America's health.
Pien Huang, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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