“It’s a really, really, dangerous vision,” Friedrich-Karnik tells SELF.
The next pandemic could be much harder to fight.
Project 2025 acknowledges the global impact of COVID-19 (albeit with some incorrect claims), but it goes on to suggest a number of policies that could make the next pandemic so much harder to prevent or get under control. Its biggest target? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), of course, which Project 2025 says should be slashed into two separate agencies: one that collects and publishes data and another that is responsible for public health yet has what is described as “a severely confined ability to make policy recommendations.” As an example, the document says that the CDC had no business suggesting that churches close down in 2020 to prevent COVID’s spread—“What is the proper balance of lives saved versus souls saved?” the agenda’s authors write, adding that the CDC “should be required by law to stay in its lane.”
Leighton Ku, MPH, PhD, director of the Center for Health Policy Research at George Washington University, tells SELF it’s ironic that Project 2025 talks at length about the importance of being prepared for the next pandemic, but then “takes apart the agency that deals with this problem.” You might think that the agenda would instead offer ways to invest in disease monitoring and technology to help us respond to health threats more quickly, but nope—“not one word,” Dr. Ku tells SELF. He adds that Project 2025 is just all around “weird” and doesn’t actually get to the heart of some of the most important issues facing this country, like mental health challenges, cancer, and diabetes.
Project 2025 goes on to say that the CDC “is not qualified” to offer professional medical opinions, shouldn’t be allowed to say that kids “should be masked or vaccinated” to protect their own or other’s health, and in the future, these policy calls should be left to—are you ready for this?—”politically accountable parties.”
In other words, politicians, not highly trained scientists and health care providers, would determine what is and isn’t safe next time a deadly virus spreads out of control. Case in point: The agenda wants Congress to “establish a set time frame for any public health emergency,” as if we know exactly when a virus decides it’s done doing its thing. “I could see there might need to be more discussion about how we determine when there’s a public health emergency,” Dr. Ku says, “but to sort of say, Gee, let’s set a time limit in advance, doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.”
Prescription drugs may become a lot more expensive for people with Medicare.
Just this year, the more than 1.5 million people enrolled in Medicare Part D—a program that helps cover the costs of prescription drugs and vaccinations for adults ages 65 and older, plus some folks with disabilities—finally felt some financial relief from hefty out-of-pocket costs. It was all thanks to a law enacted in 2022 called the Inflation Reduction Act, which capped annual out-of-pocket drug costs at $3,300 for 2024 (it’ll drop to $2,000 next year), limited insulin costs to $35 per month, and made all recommended vaccines completely free for enrollees. It also introduced a program that gave Medicare the ability to negotiate prices directly with manufacturers; because of this, 10 common drugs for conditions like diabetes and blood clots will now be up to 79% cheaper beginning in 2026.
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