Last week, a judge decided to temporarily block a federal order that would have terminated $31 million in grant funding to the Rhode Island Department of Health. The next hearing on the order is set to take place on April 16.
The grant funding was originally awarded to the state during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, the funds have expanded to other pandemic prevention and public health initiatives.
With infectious disease outbreaks around the country — such as the recent measles outbreak in Texas and the H5N1 bird flu cases in Rhode Island — infectious disease experts and legislators are worried that funding cuts may hinder pandemic-prevention efforts.
Cutting pandemic planning funding could make “us all highly vulnerable” to infectious disease outbreaks, said Leonard Mermel, a professor of medicine at the Warren Alpert Medical School and the medical director of Brown University Health’s Department of Epidemiology and Infection Control.
On April 1, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha co-led the lawsuit against the HHS with 23 other attorneys general, The Herald previously reported.
According to the lawsuit, just over 40% of the grant funding had been allocated to the state’s Immunization and Vaccines for Children program, which includes “vaccination clinics, partnerships with community organizations to promote vaccination and increase vaccine confidence, proper vaccine storage and upgrading our immunization registry,” RIDOH Spokesperson Joseph Wendelken wrote in an email to The Herald.
Grant funding has also been directed to initiatives that support community health workers and address post-pandemic health disparities.
In an email to The Herald, an HHS official wrote that the funds were initially revoked because “the COVID-19 pandemic is over.”
“HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” the HHS official added.
National health officials declared COVID-19 as endemic in August 2024, The Herald previously reported.
RIDOH has been notified that the funds are accessible again “for the time being,” Wendelken wrote.
But experts are still worried about how these recent developments will impact the future of public health.
“The federal actions right now are dismantling the entire infrastructure that protects us from infectious diseases,” said Stefanie Friedhoff, a former senior policy advisor on the White House COVID-19 Response Team under the Biden administration and an associate professor of the practice of health services, policy and practice at Brown’s School of Public Health.
She expressed concern over how funding cuts and the degradation of the health care system could cause a potential lack of laboratory testing capacity and difficulties collecting and sharing critical data.
“If we think about these cuts in the context of what else is happening, the picture is pretty dire,” Friedhoff said.
She argued that not investing in childhood vaccination initiatives would cause “unnecessary suffering” and drive up health care costs.
Mermel posited that a lack of resources and information could bring the country back to the 1900s “where there’s measles and mumps and rubella, with high mortality rates in children.”
“It would be (a) horrendous, unthinkable misfortune,” Mermel added.
State officials have taken numerous actions in an attempt to combat funding suspensions. Four days after the HHS terminated the funds, Rhode Island’s congressional delegation sent a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, urging him to “restore this critical funding.”
Kennedy had not yet responded to the letter as of Wednesday afternoon, according to Noah Boucher, director of communications for U.S. Representative Seth Magaziner ’06 (D-R.I. 2).
The White House did not respond to The Herald’s request for comment.
Gov. Dan McKee’s office is “working closely with the Rhode Island Department of Health and our Office of Management and Budget to plan for all potential scenarios,” wrote Olivia DaRocha, McKee’s press secretary, in an email to The Herald.
Providence Mayor Brett Smiley is continuing “to work alongside state and federal partners to advocate for resources that will enhance public health outcomes and foster a healthier Providence,” Smiley’s Deputy Press Secretary Samara Pinto wrote in an email to The Herald.
The cuts “could be incredibly costly in the long term if Rhode Islanders end up hospitalized due to the spread of preventable illnesses,” Boucher wrote in an email to The Herald. “We are asking the administration to reverse this misguided action because lives are at stake.”
Lev Kotler-Berkowitz is a sophomore senior staff writer covering city and state politics. He is from the Boston area and is concentrating in Political Science and Economics. In his free time, Lev can be found playing baseball or running around with his dog.
