“What will the erosion of commonsense public health policy mean for families like mine with medically vulnerable children?” asks Elizabeth Bechard, Moms’ Public Health Manager, in a top opinion column in USA Today.
Elizabeth’s nine-year-old son has an autoimmune disorder. She hasn’t been able to schedule a COVID-19 shot for him or his twin sister because of recent changes to federal vaccine policy—and it’s terrifying. Because if her son gets COVID, it could trigger “months of harrowing symptoms that profoundly impact not just him but our entire family.”
Like so many parents and Moms members, Elizabeth is worried not just about changes to vaccine policy. “It is in the environmental space, too, that the administration of President Donald Trump is assaulting safeguards vital to protecting children’s well-being,” she writes.
Tell Congress: Defend EPA’s Ability to Protect Human Health and the Environment
The administration has been working nonstop, even through a government shutdown, to push forward polluting fossil fuel projects as well as rollbacks to commonsense air pollution and climate change protections. Their efforts will likely mean more supercharged heat waves, hurricanes, and wildfires—and existential threat to all our children. This is as frightening to Elizabeth as her inability to schedule a COVID shot. Because of his autoimmune disease, her son is at greater risk of the health impacts of climate-fueled extreme heat and the increased spread of tick-borne illnesses.
“Both vaccines and climate action play a vital role in keeping children safe from avoidable hazards, dangers that are often difficult to see through the haze of collective amnesia about the past and collective unwillingness to act for the benefit of the future…” writes Elizabeth. “It is incomprehensible that both vaccine and climate policy are being actively undermined by a handful of activists whose extremist views are condemned by the overwhelming majority of public health and climate experts.”
Our children deserve robust, evidence-based policies to protect them from the known dangers of air pollution and climate change. The Trump administration’s steamrolling of these policies is heartbreaking—and gives the appearance that they’re abandoning parents and caregivers on every front.
But Elizabeth is not giving up. She writes, “Like millions of others, I will keep fighting, both to get COVID-19 vaccines for my children and for the climate action they and future generations deserve.”
Read the full op-ed in USA Today.
Tell Congress: Defend EPA’s Ability to Protect Human Health and the Environment