April 4, 2025
Speech Given by SF Bay PSR President, Robert M. Gould, MD
Standing Together for Health, Science, and Sanity
Greetings to all of you, and thank you all for being here today to defend Science and Sanity.
I’m Dr. Bob Gould. I’m President of the SF Bay chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility. PSR nationally and through our chapter network represents thousands of health professionals. For more than four decades, we have been standing up for community and planetary health, and advocating for peace, environmental, racial and social justice. Democracy is a prerequisite to achieving our mission. We cannot and will not be silent now in the face of grave threats to our basic freedoms.
PSR’s work through the years has been focused on the twin existential threats posed by nuclear weapons and our burgeoning climate crisis that is entwined with rapid toxic contamination and degradation of our environment, all posing enormous danger to the very web of life that has sustained us. We are continually reminded of these impending dangers by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ annual resetting of the “Clock” that this January was advanced to 89 seconds to midnight. This “reset” is based on expert assessment of the perils posed by nuclear weapons modernization programs, abandonment of climate progress, rising biological threats including impending pandemics, and the intersection of largely unregulated AI systems.
We have relied over the years on the advances in science and health to provide us the understanding to counter these growing global dangers hidden from us by the greed and power of corporations and their minions. We now know that the denial of global warming by the fossil fuel industry dates back decades when discoveries and revelations of the industry’s own scientists were actively suppressed. Parallel cover-up of the dangers to public and environmental health posed by decades of profligate pollution by toxic chemicals, and related corporate malfeasance have been revealed in 14 million documents compiled by colleagues at UCSF’s Documents Library.
Despite this accumulated knowledge, denialism of these dangers persists at the highest levels of our government. For example, on Monday March 31 President Trump announced that he planned to relax limits on pollution from cars, saying that the move wouldn’t “mean a damn bit of difference to the environment.” According the New York Times, this is despite the fact that … “decades of science show that the pollution from automobile tailpipes has harmed the environment and public health, from the days when leaded gasoline sent neurotoxins into the air and soil to the carbon dioxide emissions that are heating the planet right now, with transportation accounting for about a third of all U.S. emissions contributing to climate change.”
As such, the protections afforded by the Biden Administrations auto rule that President Trump is seeking to overturn would, according to the EPA, provide estimated annual health benefits in the range of $99 billion because of improved air quality. As the New York Times also reported, the EPA said this “would lead to fewer premature deaths as well as a reduction in hospital admissions for respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses, nonfatal heart attacks, aggravated asthma and decreased lung function.”
Over the years, we have utilized such knowledge gained in free inquiry in science and health research to defend and protect the communities most vulnerable to the impacts of widespread pollution. This includes downwinders exposed to radioactive fallout in the atomic detonations starting in New Mexico in 1945 and extending through the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to include widespread planetary contamination. As well the intense and persistent radioactive poisoning caused by massive nuclear explosions in the Pacific, from which contaminated naval vessels were processed and sandblasted at Bayview Hunters Point in SF, leaving a covered-up radioactive legacy for generations living in my city.
We have similarly relied on advances in scientific research to defend our patients and communities subject to health impacts caused by our climate crisis and connected issues of toxic pollution. Beyond generating our own research and reports, we have relied on decades of expertise and studies emanating from numerous government agencies and institutions such as EPA, NIH and NIOSH, to provide support for our testimony for stronger health-protective regulations that have of course encountered strong opposition from corporate forces long intent on placing the burden of proof on those suffering the health effects of pollution.
But the challenges and frustrations of working in an often corporate-captured regulatory environment are nothing compared with the full-scale assault on our public and environmental health and freedom to defend it, evinced by the wholesale destruction of EPA and regulatory protections illustrated by our current Administration carrying out a corporate-friendly agenda foreshadowed well in advance by Project 2025. It has been jaw-dropping to witness the stunning and truly cruel attacks on federal employees, agencies, and programs that protect public health, preserve our national parks and forests, monitor extreme weather, safeguard nuclear security, enforce environmental protections, and provide care to the most vulnerable across our nation and the globe.
As we have seen in what has been aptly described in Rolling Stone magazine as the “Bloodbath” of April 1, 2025.
“… more than 7,000 workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services were cut. Staffers with decades of experience received emails at 5 a.m. on Tuesday that they were being placed on administrative leave and would no longer have access to their buildings, effective immediately.”
Rolling Stone reported that “… the entire CDC Division of Environmental Health and Science Practice was eliminated, including the Asthma and Air Quality Branch, the Lead Poisoning Prevention and Surveillance Branch, the Climate and Health Activity branch, and the Water Food and Environmental Health Services, among others.” Those laid-off have profound institutional knowledge that will be difficult to restore.
Rolling Stone also reported that the “… majority of employees in the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention were laid off, including the entire intimate partner violence prevention team. The CDC’s Freedom of Information Act office, which responds to public records requests, was disbanded, as was a program studying gun violence prevention, at a time when firearms remain the leading cause of death for children.”
And it was further reported in Rolling Stone that reproductive health and infertility researchers were also fired “at a time when reproductive health care has been made particularly vulnerable. Two of the three branches in the Division of Reproductive Health were eliminated, the only one left standing was the Maternal and Infant Health branch. The employees that were laid off included researchers who worked on IVF, pregnancy risk assessments, and contraception guidelines” … “that are used as a standard of care by OB-GYNs, midwives, and primary care doctors”.
And this has been accompanied by global retrenchment exemplified by the fact that, according to the
New York Times,“… the United States is ending its financial support for family planning programs in developing countries, cutting nearly 50 million women off from access to contraception” at a time when “… surveys found that globally, about 250 million women of reproductive age wish to avoid pregnancy but do not have access to a modern contraceptive method.”
All of this has been accompanied by attacks on the rights and the dignity of historically disenfranchised communities, stoking hatred and division by targeting immigrants, asylum seekers, transgender Americans, and others. As NBC News reported on April 3: “In recent weeks, academics who focus on improving the health of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer Americans have been subjected to waves of grant cancellations from the National Institutes of Health. More than 270 grants totaling at least $125 million of unspent funds have been eliminated, although the true sum is likely much greater…”
All of this represents a profound attack on science and basic factual knowledge carried out by defunding critical medical research, deleting public health and climate data, and undermining the freedom of the press through intimidation and misinformation.
Thankfully, we have seen concerted responses from the science and health community whereby approximately 1,900 leading researchers, all of them elected members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine accused the Trump administration in an open letter on March 31 of conducting a “wholesale assault on US. science” that, as reported and analyzed in the New York Times … “could set back research by decades and that threatens the health and safety of Americans” and warning “… of the damage being done by layoffs at health and science agencies and cuts and delays to funding that has historically supported research inside the government and across American universities”.
In addition, the American Public Health Association (APHA) on March 31 sent a letter to Congress criticizing “the claw back of over $11 billion in funding to state and local health departments, nonprofits, and community-based organizations,” and the cut-backs at CDC, that APHA underscored is “central to addressing the epidemic of chronic diseases, including diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and obesity … which cumulatively account for over 75% of healthcare costs and significantly reduce quality of life for millions of Americans.” According to a news release issued by APHA on April 2: “The signatories span political administrations and levels of government, having served under Presidents Carter, Clinton, George W. Bush, Biden and the first Trump administration. Their message is unified and urgent: the Trump administration’s actions pose a grave threat to the health and safety of the American people.”
APHA called for immediate Congressional oversight hearings to address the Trump Administration’s actions and swift legislative action to:
- Identify what programs are lost in restructuring HHS agencies and programs, including those in CDC, and the proposals for the new Administration for a Healthy America (AHA).
- Reinstate funding for public health agencies until there is an orderly plan for vital programs.
- Strengthen vaccine recommendations and messaging supporting vaccine use to curb outbreaks.
- Combat misinformation that undermines science and public trust.
- Bolster pandemic preparedness efforts to protect Americans from future threats.
- Protect the noncommunicable disease prevention programs developed through the knowledge and leadership at CDC that help keep America healthy.
Of course, all of these cuts to our agencies have also been accompanied by threatened cuts to healthcare and social well-being with threats to cutting Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security being considered in the current Republican budget and Administration plans, presenting intense harm to the poorest and most vulnerable Americans in order to give tax cuts to businesses and billionaires.
Thankfully, health professionals are fighting back in through their organizations against cutbacks in Medicare and Medicare and other programs. Examples include my own Santa Clara County Medical Association in partnership with California Medical Association, Physicians for National Health Program, Nurses United, etc. And we’re also fighting the slashing of basic environmental protections of our most vulnerable patients, families and communities.
These cutbacks are particularly egregious in light of plans to continue to expand the military budget including modernizing and making our nuclear arsenal more lethal. At a cost of least $1.7 trillion over 30 years, roughly equivalent to $6 million per hour over this period.
Most of all, we must not be silent and speak out as we witness such virulent attacks on the health of our democracy itself, as the President and the world’s richest man recklessly defy the checks and balances of Congress and the Courts.
I’d like to close remembering the words and example of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was murdered 57 years ago on April 4, 1968, an exact year after he delivered his extraordinary “A Time to Break Silence” on April 4, 1967 at the Riverside Church, courageously connecting the Civil Rights Movement with the Vietnam anti-war movement:
“…we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values…. we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
We invite you to join us in opposing the Trump Administration’s attacks on our health, and our survival.
Together we will find the courage, knowledge, and capacity to respond, and together we can channel our outrage into productive action.
We must stand together and for each other as never before.
To this end, join us!
