"How Corporate Greed Harms Children"

Trump & Andrew Liveris 

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In early 2017, almost immediately after taking office, Trump's first EPA overturned the agency's own determination to ban chlorpyrifos, the organophosphate pesticide we have every reason to believe caused Katherine's leukemia and subsequent relapses. Besides cancer, chlorpyrifos is also robustly tied to lower IQs and neurocognitive disorders.

Trump appointed Andrew Liveris, the CEO of Dow, which manufactures chlorpyrifos, to a White House manufacturing group after Dow wrote a $1 million dollar check for Trump's first inauguration. Dow then pushed back against all the scientific findings showing how dangerous chlorpyrifos is for our children -- and for all of us. I have a cluster of autoimmune diseases that emerged immediately after the acute exposures we believe killed Katherine.

Biden's EPA worked to try to revoke its registration of chlorpyrifos, but those attempts were repeatedly overturned in court.

Despite the MAHA report very clearly identifying pesticides as part of the cause of the declining health of U.S. children, it mentions no cross-agency proposal to ban dangerous chemicals of any kind, nor do we in the field of Children's Environmental Health expect this administration will do so given massive amounts of corruption. 

They have already pulled back proposed bans on PFAS, pre-empting states from doing anything to regulate them, even though those chemicals are highly implicated in the chronic diseases MAHA purports to target. And these chronic conditions are increasingly debilitating our children: "Over 40% of the roughly 73 million children (aged 0-17) in the United States have at least one chronic health condition, according to the CDC, such as asthma, allergies, obesity, autoimmune diseases, or behavioral disorders."

A recent article in Slate gave a very clear diagnosis of the report from a pediatrician's perspective:

The MAHA Commission has accidentally written a landmark conservative admission that the free market doesn’t work in health care—that allowing corporations to operate without regulation corrupts institutions and undermines children’s well-being.

Stunningly, rather than embrace the obvious solution its data demand, the report pivots to blaming “the overmedicalization of our kids.” That is, it claims that doctors like me and our health care system at large are too focused on treating illness and not on preventing it in the first place.

This is where the commission’s logic completely breaks down. It has spent dozens of pages documenting how corporate greed harms children, from selling them ultra-processed foods to exposing them to chemical toxins, creating an environment that leads to obesity, asthma, and other chronic illnesses. Then the group proposes solving this issue by giving those same interests more power while scapegoating the doctors trying to treat the resulting diseases of a system that prioritizes profit over well-being.

I think this is exactly correct.

At a time of historic corruption, while Trump is dismantling the agencies trying to do something to protect human health by cleaning up the environment, it would be the surprise of my life if protections for children were at all strengthened. Most of us in Environmental Public Health instead expect the meager protections we have to be utterly gutted.

 -Prof. Jean-Marie Kauth, Benedictine University, Lisle Illinois

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