A veteran physician reveals how a series of US government policies are systematically dismantling critical health, nutrition, and education protections for children, leading to preventable harm and a 'looking away' from the consequences.
A critical care physician with over 40 years of experience argues that the US government is systematically harming children through a series of methodical policy changes, despite rationales like 'fiscal discipline' or 'parental choice'. The article details a sequence of actions impacting children from birth through school age. At birth, the routine childhood immunization schedule has been narrowed, with the hepatitis B birth dose removed, increasing the risk of chronic infection. Refusals of the vital vitamin K shot have also nearly doubled. For early childhood, the administration's budget proposes significant cuts to WIC's fruit-and-vegetable benefits and has targeted Head Start for elimination or freezes. Millions of children have lost insurance coverage through Medicaid and CHIP. Broader cuts include the largest reduction to food stamps in 60 years and the cancellation of a billion-dollar program providing locally grown produce to school cafeterias. For children with disabilities, oversight of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) is being moved to HHS, and the Office for Civil Rights to the Department of Justice, seemingly to fulfill a promise to abolish the Department of Education, with no clear benefit for children. The author also points out that the administration is 'switching off the instruments that would register the harm,' such as reducing reporting requirements for child immunization on Medicaid and not federally counting vitamin K refusals. The physician concludes that the cost of 'looking away' from these harms is paid in lives, later, by the people least able to absorb it, and that society is 'taking back' its fundamental promise to newborns, one program at a time.
