Sen. Patty Murray this week provided a few more details about her plan to address the cracks that have undercut the country's public health system over the last two years, an initiative that includes following the lead of three nationally recognized medical providers from Washington state.
Murray's office announced the new committee — called the Public Health for America Working Group — last week. The nonpartisan group's mission is to inform policy decisions that would better safeguard public health agencies and protocols after President Donald Trump leaves office, she said. It's unclear what exactly that will look like in practice, but Murray offered two possible examples of legislation at a Wednesday panel discussion at Washington State University.
Maybe there should be a limit on the number of political appointees at health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, she said. Or, the group might find ways to protect consistent funding for local and state health agencies.
But a key focus will be on restoring trust in medical providers, public health systems and scientific experts, the Washington Democrat said. That overall confidence has suffered, Murray said, as Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have fired hundreds of CDC workers, slashed scientific grants, restructured a key vaccine advisory panel and continued to repeat disproved claims about childhood vaccinations.
“Unfortunately, it is painfully clear right now that these threats to our public health system were ones we were simply not equipped to prevent,” Murray said to a crowd of reporters and college students in Pullman. “And curing them is going to take some serious work. That is exactly why I'm here today.”
The work group is made up of five members, so far, though a spokesperson for Murray's office said the senator hopes to bring on more people over time. Three of the initial five are from Washington state.
Dr. Helen Chu is an infectious disease and allergy professor at UW Medicine whose flu lab was the first in the U.S. to identify community COVID-19 spread. Patty Hayes, a registered nurse, is the chair of the state's Board of Health who served as director of King County’s public health department during the first couple of years of the pandemic. And Dr. Vin Gupta is a critical care pulmonologist at Virginia Mason Franciscan Health and distinguished practitioner at the University of Washington, whose work also fell into the spotlight in 2020 as he appeared on national TV hundreds of times to demystify the virus.
“I’m deeply honored by this,” Gupta said in an interview this week. “This reflects important leadership that clearly has been lacking over the last two years, and congressional accountability that's desperately needed to separate politics from science.”
The working group’s other members are Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and former head of the Maryland Department of Health who also served in the Obama administration, and Jeffrey Levi, who worked on AIDS prevention in the Clinton administration and later taught health policy at George Washington University.
From Chu’s perspective, this new group is “exactly what I should be doing right now.”
After Kennedy fired her and others from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel last year, replacing them with his own picks, the Seattle researcher has been distressed to see the CDC group's work stall.
Even if she were still a member, she said, “there’s no way to serve on a panel that makes vaccine decisions, because whatever decision you make won’t be adopted by HHS, right?”
So now, Chu is excited to “politics-proof” the process, she said.
When rebuilding the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, for example, Chu might like to see rules about who can — and cannot — rewrite the group’s charter. The charter, a document developed in the 1960s, governs the rules and regulations of the ACIP group, such as what types of expertise need to be represented.
The charter is typically reviewed every two years, remaining mostly unchanged, but in April the Trump administration updated the document to broaden the qualifications for panel members and add new organizations known for spreading vaccine misinformation as liaison members to the committee.
“The idea is potentially that you can remake your charter to be whatever you want it to be, to accommodate your political ideas or the direction you want things to head,” Chu said. “And that just cannot be the case.”
Gupta, in addition, hopes the group will inform policy around communicating health information to the public and increasing accountability and review of health agencies like the CDC. He also wants to elevate conversations around how technology and artificial intelligence are going to change clinical care.
“None of those conversations are happening at the federal level right now in a coherent way,” Gupta said. “I can understand why some people feel like the government doesn't represent their best interest because, again, we don't communicate clearly to them.”
As someone with a lot of practice breaking down complex scientific topics and correcting health misinformation on social media — and who still regularly appears on-air as a medical analyst for MS NOW — Gupta may be particularly well-suited to help re-envision the way the public learns about top agencies' health decisions.
I think the group represents individuals with complementary skill sets, and this is just the beginning," he said.
That mindset was echoed Wednesday, as Murray heard experiences from a panel of public health experts and doctors, mostly from Eastern Washington and Idaho, who spoke about how their work has become increasingly politicized since Trump’s return to office — from vaccines to grant funding.
Dr. Katie Hryniewicz, a pediatrician in Pullman who joined the Wednesday discussion, said she often hears from parents in "freeze mode," who are inundated with online vaccine misinformation and don't know what to believe anymore.
"I live this every day, (seeing) the impacts of some things that are said, either by parents or influencers or people in power," Hryniewicz said. "It makes a difference."
Murray is the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee and could soon lead the panel if her party retakes control of the chamber this fall. She also still sits on the Senate health committee.
"I am sincerely determined to talk to everyone," Murray said. "And out of those conversations, we build trust.
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