The last few months have seen massive attacks on the public health sector.
New NIH funding guidelines, released on April 21, 2025, require that recipients of federal funds must certify that they do not operate any programs which advance or promote diversity, equity, inclusion or accessibility, and that they do not engage in boycotts of Israel or companies doing business in Israel. U. S. government COVID.gov website has been replaced with an unsupported allegation that COVID was leaked from a lab in China.
Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) threatens to expand deportation, including within hospital systems, with NYU’s Langone Hospital admitting immigrants will not be safe from deportation within their gates.
Amid these dramatic changes, healthcare workers and public health experts argue that hospitals have a strong role to play in keeping patients safe, from defending research and conditions of care that ensure all can have access to medicine, from anti-immigrant attacks and infectious disease alike.
A new journal article in Journal of American Medicine Association (JAMA) Network Open shows that small decisions taken by hospitals can have an important impact on patient safety and wellbeing, reducing hospital-acquired illness and death from COVID. And public health advocates suggest that healthcare workers can have an important role in securing ongoing access to vital research funding, safe patient care, and protecting immigrant patients.
In a public webinar, on April 24, 2025 at 11:30AM ET/8:30 AM PT, public health experts highlighted a three-prong strategy to #ProtectOurPatients. They are joined by the JAMA paper lead author Theodore Pak, MD, PhD