Nearly 1,000 people celebrated public health Wednesday at APHA’s Rally for the Public’s Health on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The rally followed APHA’s successful four-day Annual Meeting and Expo, attended by more than 11,000 health advocates and boasting the theme “Making the Public’s Health a National Priority.”

Doctors, politicians and organization leaders fired up the crowd at the APHA-organized event by condemning health actions by the Trump administration, including those by the Department of Health and Human Services under the leadership of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

Since Trump’s inauguration this year, funding cuts, firings, grant recissions and policy reversals have devasted public health and many people’s lives, especially among underrepresented groups, speakers said. Federal public health agencies have been compromised, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“We stand strongest when we stand together,” APHA Executive Director Georges Benjamin said. “The American Public Health Association has a long history of activism, but now more than ever, we need to come together to speak for health, to speak for all people who cannot be here today, who are trying to survive and thrive in an increasingly challenging world.”

Rep. Kim Schrier, D-Wash., a pediatric physician, has publicly railed against Kennedy’s views on vaccines. In June, during a congressional budget hearing and under questioning from Schrier, Kennedy admitted his lack of medical expertise on common infectious diseases, including measles, which under Kennedy’s watch has ballooned into the largest U.S. measles outbreak since the disease was declared eliminated in 2000.

“I cannot wait for another opportunity to take him on face to face, because my goal is not just to set the record straight about vaccinations,” Schrier said. “It is to discredit him and his anti-vax movement that is lying to people, scaring patients.”

The federal government’s spending bill enacted in July cuts Medicaid and other public benefits programs for low-income people, while failing to extend enhanced premium tax credits for people buying their insurance plans on the federal and state health insurance marketplaces, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Many individuals and families will see astronomical increases in their monthly plan.

“The reason (President Donald Trump) wants working people to pay more for their health care is because he wants more room in the federal budget to give billionaires like him a tax giveaway,” Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-FL, said. “Should we allow him to sacrifice our families so billionaires can get another yacht? Should we allow him to sacrifice our families so that a mega corporation doesn’t have to pay as many taxes?”

At a time of extreme political polarization in America, State Rep. Justin Jones, D-TN, took a moment in his talk to say to Republican colleagues in the Tennessee General Assembly who have voted against progressive policies that public health is in everyone’s interest. Health equity, racial equality, affordable health care, livable wages, and clean water and air benefit everyone, he said.

We are fighting for them, he said, and for their “children and grandchildren, too.”

Rally attendee Margaret Cotroneo, a retired educator in nursing and APHA member, said many in the public do not grasp what public health is and how it benefits all people in society.

“Public health is the community of citizens who have a stake in remaining healthy and in being embedded in healthy environments,” Cotroneo said. “It addresses that larger picture. People don’t always understand that, and I think that’s why public health gets ignored.”

Photos courtesy EZ Event Photography.