White House mandates move away from overdose prevention in US health programs

Health programs receiving federal funding must agree within days to new priorities from the Trump administration , including a focus on “parental authority” in education and a move away from proven overdose-prevention methods like harm reduction, suggesting greater political control over public health. The new priorities will likely affect progress against the opioid crisis , and they could signal an attack on vaccination requirements at schools, which are set at the state and local level. The priorities may also weaponize public health to quash “public disorder.” The move “absolutely” appears to signal greater political interference into public health, said Nabarun Dasgupta, a street drug researcher and senior scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Injury Prevention Research Center. “This is a warm-up. This is a warning shot,” he said. The move appears to be a “prelude” to imposing similar restrictions of other kinds of federal funding, such as direct service provision, he added. Some of the new policies “are in tension with public health” and would undermine that work, including “prioritizing parental control over, potentially, children’s health and community health”, said Dorit Reiss, a vaccines expert and professor at UC Law San Francisco. “Similarly, housing programs and harm reduction programs save lives and promote health,” she said. …